The Sadness of Finishing a Painting, and How Long it Took.

I have almost finished this painting.

Mary Kemp. Late Summer Greenhouse.
Oil on canvas panel. 60 x 50 cm.

It's up from the studio into the house and over the coming  days I will look at it, think about it and make any adjustments necessary.

As always, and stupidly, I feel sad when finishing a painting and totally without purpose.

And along comes the thought that I needn't have bothered, and it's all full of  mistakes, and it's awful and boring and amateurish and no one will like it anyway.

Does any one else feel like that?

I need time to see it in perspective.
Or perhaps it's rubbish anyway.

To cheer myself up a bit I let loose a splurge of magenta acrylic over a new board, and roughly blocked out a future masterpiece. On wards and upwards.

But my heart is still on this old painting. It has need of a bit more loving care before being finally chained down in a frame.
It's been entered in a local art exhibition in Stamford, and I hope it gets selected. The standard is quite high.

I've never done this before but this time when I painted I recorded the hours spent on this picture. 

Postcards for the Eastern Open 2014

I am entering the Eastern Open 2014.
On Saturday I took two pictures down to the Haddenham Gallery just north of Cambridge and am hoping for the best.
Selection for the Eastern Open is quite untraditional so I'm not sure if my work will fit in, stand out!?

However part of the joy of this exhibition is we can submit artist's postcards, which will be exhibited regardless of the fate of your main works.
So I am painting two very tiny boat pieces.
I'm using acrylic which are driving me mad because they dry before I expect them to. Ho Hum. But I've also added Sharpie pen, and I quite enjoy that. It just glides over the surface.

Mary Kemp
Boats
Acrylic and Sharpie

I'll post the result on my Facebook Page! 

Art by the Seaside.

 Summer has been taken up with quite a few visits to the seaside.
There seems to be an invisible cord that pulls me towards waves and sand.
I walk on the beach, I poke about in seaside towns, what more could you ask of life?
I suppose at some stage I ought to knuckle down and do some real work, but until then here are a few works of art I've seen at the seaside.

Clock, Southwold Pier.

Back in the Studio

Oh it's great to be back to the old routine.
Somehow even though we have no children to look after summer seems to have been taken up with, well, summer.
On the plus side, I have gathered so much material that in my head there are a zillion paintings all waiting to burst onto the canvas.