Making A Painting Slightly Better

This is one of those paintings that flew off the brush, others struggle their way to the trash can. Although the subject had no fall colors on the left side , I added some small amounts to spread a similar temperature throughout the painting and a similar warm color. It may hurt the painting to overdo on the left the side.
May you all have wonderful holidays and enjoy them. My tendency is to work too hard, don't grind if you can avoid it, I can turn anything into work like most of us, just get a little better each day and take a day off to be part of normal life. You need to be much more than  an artist.

Enhancing A Field Study 2 Simplification

  I don't know about you but I am always making things too complicated, especially when outside looking at all the detail or just looking too much at the subject matter and not organizing and simplifying,isn't it funny. Previously in a post I altered this one to create more depth, etc., but I lost some atmosphere in the middle mountain.
  In these revisions I hopefully simplified the mountain and the rock shapes and got a lil better tree shapes, and hopefully better related the mid mountain. I am sure I would change some things again, when I paint it larger. Will do some more of these because I loved it when other artists critique their own work, it helps me to learn .

On Giving to Charities

CHAllENGED CHILD ANNUAL CHARITY EVENT

HOSTED BY RED AND BOB BUISSON,                   jurying in association with 

THE HIGH MUSEUM OF ART

 As an artist, of most of us it is difficult to earn money, and most charities are great causes, so it seems to be best not to cheapen the process and ourselves. Perhaps we should be honest with ourselves and try develop a pure intent first.
 It is easy to be resentful when donating originals as we are asked often and they are difficult to produce for most of us, I noticed my feelings of resentment in myself recently. What if we overcome our torn feelings by picking the charity or charities we fully believe in and donate a good original to it with a pure intent to help and for no other reason or benefit, not expecting anything in return. You can't donate to all charity requests and the process is cheapened by donating less than your good work. If you donated giclees or prints to the other charities, or some other smaller donation than an original or respectfully declined we may maintain our true intent.
 In listening to several nuns wisdom, they make it clear you can't do everything requested of you, and as an artist your number one mission in life is to create for the world. It isn't easy and requires dedication at a very high level. The arts are a necessity and what you do is probably enriching the world. In the days of the depression , they kept some of the playhouses open in New York for free or minimal prices to provide for the spirits of people in such trying times. Another great wisdom perhaps.
 Maybe you have other ways of dealing with these feelings.

Enhancing A Field Study

Sometimes we maybe should see if I can improve the field study in the studio, it would be logical that you should be able to, but sometimes we lose certain things in the original ,but we must take this risk to learn to grow. Above is the revised and below is the original. I see certain things I like better in each. I played with the depth, a greater color temperature shift and some of the shapes. Make frustration your friend, and laugh a little as you try to improve a painting.  It never ceases to amaze me how hard painting can be , especially when trying to grow, but it can be quite satisfying if you can learn something new, hope you enjoyed this little comparison, I will be doing a couple of others in the next few weeks.