It continues to be a struggle to find inspiration to paint, but I created something today, so that's progress. It's a quiet scene at a muddy beach during low tide; the sun sets on the distant horizon as fiery clouds float overhead. Nothing over-the-top, but it's still a painting and thus a statement against the grief of my mom's passing. What tangles my paintings with her memory is that she would buy greeting cards each year with prints of my paintings on them, and that just won't happen again, sadly.
I've been thinking about experimenting more with my painting style and trying new approaches to landscapes. It can be a challenge to find something new to say in a landscape when you've been painting them for so long. Paintings blur together and there's the burden of wanting things to be realistic enough to be recognizable, but you don't want "realism" to turn into stress - painting should be fun, not homework.
I also sometimes wonder how artists develop their own unique styles. Does style just happen or do they one day put a paintbrush to the canvas and do something completely different than normal, and if it works, they keep going with that approach? It's hard to say. Countless books will teach how to create good landscape paintings, but it seems that style can't be taught, and everyone must find a way to make the process fun and not work. Stuff to think about.
Acrylic painting: 14" x 17"
