Coming to a couch near you

Title of the post comes from a newspaper Ad I found in Wall Street Journal. Amongst painters it is a bit of a cliche.  We're often told at openings, "Oh, I so love this painting, but it will simply not match my couch".  At that point I smile and say "I understand". Honestly, I do I have a couch and a color scheme. In my case it would be "your painting wouldn't look good on my bright grasshopper green wall". Well, this little sentence "Coming to a couch..." is going to find itself collaged into a painting soon.  I can't resist a little humor relief once in a while.

A very busy and productive weekend.  I started five new canvases Saturday, so now I have seven paintings going at once. The one on the easel Toil and Humdrum though is going extremely fast and will be done before the rest.  I'm really happy with this canvas and I can't say why.  I mean I'm happy with all of them, but there's something great going on with this canvas.  I love the texture and the painterly brush strokes.  I think I'm going to make a series out of it. I'm not putting buildings in this one and a few others.  I want to focus in on the actual movement of the people in the composition.  I'm also going to put a little more color into some of these works. It will be subtle though. There actually is a fair amount of Payne's Grey in this painting.

Oh, the two photos above are the under-painting and fabric collage stage of a triptych I started Saturday.  It's going to be along the same lines of Toil and Humdrum.