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. 


Having worked on nothing else over the past  three weeks I'm surprised at how little time I've actually spent brush to canvas. I must have frittered away an awful lot of time on other painting related things but not much on painting.

It came to 28 hours all told, but there will be a few more hours tidying up.

So really nearly a week's work. Interesting.

How does your experience of  finishing a painting compare with mine?

Please leave me your thoughts in the comments box.