The Devil is in the details always. It's the small reference to the welds, the wear and tear from countless storms on a paint finish that make a bridge come alive. It's also just the pure build up of paint of roughing things out and then doing it again that infuse the canvas with the history required to expose the spirit within the canvas. Sometimes it's about an artist getting frustrated one day only to walk in the following morning to realize that what he was all worked up about looks fine and the said artist was simply tired from working all day. Truthfully, if I don't get frustrated(commonly the result of working too hard) with my canvases I don't feel like I'm working hard enough. I know with Remember the Day (Steel Bridge commission piece) that I painted myself entirely into a corner. It wasn't until I dreamed of painting the two canvases and using heavy gel medium to sculpt the letters onto the surface and obscure the design motif that it clicked. Now I have a technique that's going to drive the work of the next show.
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