Lavender & Then Some

There I was, standing in one of my favorite places to paint, Bohemian Lavender Farm near Maple City, on the Saturday of the Glen Arbor Paint-out. I had finished one larger painting in the morning and had spent about an hour on this 10x10 panel. Then a reality which I had conveniently ignored to that point hit me: The painting wasn’t working. My focus had been a row of lavender against the farm’s barn—and now here I was, with only about forty-five minutes to complete a painting and make it back to Glen Arbor to turn in it and the larger morning painting. So I did what artists do (more often than they’d care to admit, I’m betting): I scraped the entire panel and started again, choosing a different composition. Perhaps I need to paint quickly more often, because this painting sold immediately at the Glen Arbor exhibition that evening. It’s just a simple composition, and perhaps that’s another lesson to be learned.