(85) Red Hot, Baby!
6 x 6, oil
I started out painting "girl stuff" with the plan to switch subjects after a week, but here I am two weeks into it, and (a) I have lots more stuff and (b) I find the challenges of painting satin, velvet and animal prints, as well the decisions involved in rendering metal and glass (in the lipsticks and nail polish) to be most informative, demanding, and interesting. Before I started the daily-painting challenge, I sat down and listed over 200 subjects that I wanted to study in paint. One such challenge was sheer fabric, which I attempted above. Can you tell that some of the scarf is sheer, and other parts are overlapped?
A lot of daily-painters opt to paint the same fruits and vegetables for months or even years at a time. And, while I see the merit in choosing a subject to study in depth; I would miss the challenges and painting decisions that a variety of subjects demands (plus, I would lose my mind)--which reminds me of a great scene from one of my all-time favorite movies "The Four Seasons" (written and directed by the brilliant Alan Alda) in which Nick explains how boring his wife, and his life, have become. He tells his friend Jack about his wife's obsession with photographing the same vegetables over and over..."For a year and a half, all we talked about was zucchini. Then, for another year it was green peppers. That was a nice change..."