It seems a little odd …as I don’t always enjoy painting. It often seems to serve a masochistic purpose where I continually test myself by trying new and more difficult things and then when I am finished and have managed to make a reasonable job , I discount it by telling myself that I could have done it so much better if I had tried harder.

However that doesn’t happen every time. ( yes it does…)

I think I must have missed the part of being an artist where you get to believe that because you have painted your personal view of something that it has some value .

Mostly I paint things that I hope people will like and then they will buy so that I can pay the electric bill etc.

Recently I have been combining this with several personal challenges . For example trying to make Pisticci, which is mostly white, full of colour. That has been fun. Then when someone commissioned a flower painting by Van Gogh , it was fun , at first ,trying to paint in a different style. Sometimes I paint things entirely because I like them. Most of them are unsold.

Todays two pieces of art are completely different from each other

I had one more attempt at that darn weird plant today, this time with watercolours. I think it has me beat….or bored. But I was impressed with my persistence.

Then my next work was to paint my room which includes the large vase of flowers which I painted for my birthday. I saw some work by an American artist who painted a lot of ordinary things , such as her living room and was selling her work for a lot of money and wondered if I could do something similar. I quite enjoyed painting it and hopefully it will be finished tomorrow.

So today I have mostly painted.

If I was to sell a painting for the amount of money the American artist does, I would only need to paint one painting every 5 years . Probably I would be bored for four years and 50 weeks before I needed to do another one. So it’s just as well that is not likely to happen.

Was the usual thunderstorm this afternoon and now its nice again. I wonder if it really will be 32C tomorrow. I may need to look out my sandals. …..

Cheers 🍷🍷