Saturday on Max: Accepting the challenge.

Saturday on Max   14" X18" Acrylic on Canvas Panel

The story behind this painting began last Wednesday.  I sold the Downtown at Daybreak  painting last week.  This left a spot to fill at the B2 (Squared) wine Bar.  I was encouraged to do another cityscape so... 

I spent the better part of my Wednesday attempting another cityscape.  It did not go well.  However, as with most paintings I learned a few things along the way.  I was also reminded of a couple of things.  The most important being that you can never compromise on the composition.  I thought I could compose the painting without precisely measuring the angles.  I was wrong.  No matter what I tried the painting was just a little off.  I had to scrap the entire painting and choose a new subject.  So Saturday I chose this  challenging scene of a Max train going up the downtown transit mall.  I had shied away from this because I wasn't sure how the  Max train would end up looking.  But I really liked the scene.
  I thought I would start by painting some of the train to get some practice with the values and angles.  So I began to paint over the last painting.  As it progressed I realized that it was going well enough that I should continue.  By Sunday morning I had committed to this version.  So what had started as an exercise painting over the last panel  ended up being a finished painting.
On a side note, I took photos of the process.  At one point I washed the entire top of the painting with white to get rid of the painting beneath. This created a very interesting fog like effect with the buildings in the background of the old painting creating ghostly images and the train emerging into the foreground.  I liked it so much I almost left it as it was, but I was determined to try to finish the scene.  And I thought I could always go back later, wash it out and achieve the same effect.  Later as I was putting in the trees, I decided to try and go back to the wash.  This didn't work because the trees were now part of the painting and the effect was not believable enough.
Unfortunately the photos I took of this effect have been lost forever.   When I shut off my old camera, the lense refused to retract into the body.  Long story short,  the camera was in my pocket, and when I went to change clothes today, I stepped on the lense and effectively killed the thing.  The photos are in the camera's internal memory (another result of the dying camera) and it will not power up.  So new painting, and new camera today.  Both were long overdue.

Detail.

Not a lot to say...

It must sound (or look) like I just cut and paste the same comment every time I post something these days, but I still feel the need to make the excuse...
I have been working so many hours lately that this small painting sat on my desk for weeks before I did a few more things to it and decided to post it.  I'm not quite finished with it.  I just got tired of feeling like it should be done.  Initially it was going to be a quick impressionistic study, and it is for the most part, but  I ended up having to do more with it than I intended. 
   Things are not all work, however.  I was able to take a long weekend trip to the coast with my wife last week and we had a fantastic time.  And of course I have squeezed in some golf...
I have found that if I don't start working on a painting in the morning, the distractions of the day seem to prevent me from doing anything at all.