Do you ever wish for a Do-over?

This is the first time I painted over one of my old canvases. Typically, it's very tough for me to let go of even my most disliked pieces, but I wanted this challenge of working on top of something already formed. I thought it would be so wonderful to already have a textured work from the get go, so that I wouldn't have to spend the time establishing texture from the ground up. How fundamentally wrong was I!

All the lines and grooves are formed in all the wrong places for this current piece, and every new layer is going against the grain of what's already established. It's like you're trying to change someone whose personality has been formed long ago.

At some point, however, you realize that old scars won't go away. All you can do is simply work with them, bring a new light to them, a brighter life. Yes, it is typically escapism that I'm after in my work, but it doesn't have to erase all notions of my reality. It can bring me to a new place by building on top of what's there.

 It comes out as an antiqued Instagram photo, with patches of seemingly forgotten white space open for interpretation. Some layers are scratched off to the very core of my original marks, with a new mask seemingly hiding all wounds. However, the more you add to an existing patch of texture, the more sophisticated it becomes...

Layers

I was part of a unique and very insightful workshop a few weeks ago, led by my art teacher and life coach Andrey Tamarchenko, and Judith Schafman, a psychologist who specialized in dream work.

It introduced me to a very counter-intuitive, yet very liberating approach to painting, which utilizes layers of meditation. The work therefore also consists of layers, often invisible. It bothered me at first that they're unseen - there I am putting all this energy in, and you can't see half of my work. But now that I've tried it a few times, I can tell that underlying sketches still remain - in the feel of the piece, in its energy. And when you keep reworking the painting, and are so afraid of taking sections away - they never do go away completely. Key elements will always be felt. It's such a stress relief to know that.

It's like when you start a new job and you feel that you're starting from scratch. Yet you always bring what you had already learned with you. When HR departments hire recent college graduates - I hope they know that those periods of intense research, sleepless nights, deadlines - were all there, they shaped a person's ability to concentrate. When one relationship ends and another starts - you're a person layered with knowledge of past mistakes and accomplishments...

I've begun to truly enjoy watercolors, after almost 20 years of utilizing them for sketches. I finally understand their layers and how nothing quite goes away, but can only be made better with time.

Brushstrokes - it's not what we say, it's how we say it...

I've spent some time with a friend art therapist this past week analyzing my work. I doubt I'd take up art therapy as even she stopped painting once she got deeply into the analyzing part. You begin overthinking your every move, every compositional element and color that goes onto your canvas.

However, what she said to me as part of her insights was truly simple and dumbfounding - "How about you play with your brushstrokes?"

When I thought of the perfect formula for a successful painting, I forgot this crucial ingredient. Yes, there's composition and line, and color, but it's this element that adds movement, forms depth and instills a personal style into the piece. Without paying attention to it, a painting is too polished, too void of emotion.

It's like a conversation that leads nowhere, or offends, or discloses too much. Perhaps certain intentions were there but the execution was lacking. So my goal for the next 'green' painting is to focus not so much on the content, but on the way of delivering it.