Jim photographed two of my new water reflection paintings this week. You can see Agua Caliente–Ripple on my home page.
The other painting is one I did a blog about a few weeks ago. It started with taking an old painting off its’ stretcher bars, cutting masonite panels to size and gluing them onto the stretcher bars, adding a barrier coat of GAC 100 to protect the painting from eventual staining, coating this with gesso, and diving in.
I’ve posted several photos of my progress on this one (see previous blog posts). And this week I really did think it was done. Or I wouldn’t have asked Jim to set up all his equipment and spend several hours photographing and color correcting. Yesterday he brought the painting back to the studio. He did a great job of photographing it, as usual.
Agua Caliente Palm Reflection with blue/black frame border
The painting just didn’t look quite right to me when Jim brought it back to my studio after doing meticulous color corrections on his computer. I tried to ignore the painting. But before I knew it, I had it laying flat on a table with tape all around the border. I decided that maybe the dark border was the problem. Even though I’d already tried a lighter border several times in different colors. Why didn’t I just leave it as is? I don’t know, but there I was with brush in hand and a different color paint on the border. By the way, the tape is to protect the painting from my flailing brushes.
Several hours (and numerous coats of paint later) I quit. I still haven’t had the nerve to pull the blue tape off the painting to see if this time I got it right. Here is a snapshot.
Taped edges, with a new, lighter border
I realize that it’s hard to tell what I’ve got going on here. Next week, I’ll take the plunge and pull the tape off. By the way, Jim dropped by the studio while I was re-painting. His eyebrows went up and he said, “Guess I’ll be photographing this one again.” I hope it’ll be worth his while!