Speedpainting Cuckold Creek

I love painting but rarely carve out time for it. It invites a different place of work for me than poetry or songwriting. Writing and composing require all my attention. But while I paint, I listen to videos or books or treat it like meditation with music, or in silence. Everytime I paint, I think I should paint more often — always feels restful and fulfilling, even when frustrating, even when the outcome is not so good.

It seems the County Fair years are over for my kids and I. That’s when I did most of my paintings, to enter in the Fair. Ribbons are scattered and lost around the house. In my favorite year, Quinn and I both won 5th place and Coley 2nd. Young Quinn and I enjoyed that and thereafter I always referred to the “coveted 5th place.”

The last time I cared deeply about nailing a painting was for the cover of my poetry collection, Escape Velocity. I planned to use an image from Unsplash, as the publisher suggested, but got some shade from my friends about that. They believed it should be my work. I’m glad they pushed back. Creating the cover art was a frustrating, challenging, and highly satisfying. I spent hours, probably forty, across 10 days of winter break trying to capture a fitting scene. Part of the problem was that, when I started, I did not entirely know what I wanted. I went in three different directions, in hopes that I would hit upon it. And I did.

Last weekend, I painted a picture I care as deeply about. It only took about seven hours in total. Saturday night, I looked through pictures, decided perspective, and developed a rough sketch. Sunday morning, I woke pre-dawn, set up my paints, and my camera to video, and painted through mid-morning. I share with you my first speed paint! 

I’m psyched with how it turned out and enjoyed many tangential bits of the process. Coley called from college to help talk me through the tech / website for the video editing, which I found remarkably not frustrating, except I couldn't use the song I wanted, due to copyright laws. It gave lots of AI options (don’t get me started). I’m linking the song I wanted to use here, because I can and I want to share it. Bauhaus, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything. In lieu of that, I improvised my own instrumental. How magic that it’s even a thing possible to do! Coley later texted me, “I think using your own music was an immaculate choice.” Anything I do that impresses my kids makes me jazzed.

This speed paint represents about three-fourths of the painting. I moved on to use more  paint pens for richer saturation of color. The final result is below.

Why? you might ask, do I care so much about this painting? Stay tuned…

And have a wonderful week!