A New Painting: "Red Curve", Thinking about Image and Scale

Red Curve, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 6 x 8 1/2 in. 

Sometimes I fall in love with a painting I've done right away, sometimes I feel wishy washy, and sometimes downright hostile. All these feelings––I should really call them assessments––can shift toward a positive or negative direction over time, or shade into indifference. It is usually not the quality of the paint or anything technical that forms these opinions but the image in the painting, the thing depicted, which includes its composition. I'm someone who doesn't like repeating herself, which is why I never made prints of paintings; I always want to start something with different arrangements of shape, color, and light. Although the images I use go through a continual winnowing process, I still don't like them all equally. I'm sure this happens to you when making things, or writing etc; I wonder if this is easier for those painters who work with a more defined format. So, Red Curve is in the wishy-washy category for me right now, though I like it better after repainting the rust-red color, which was originally too transparent so not weighty enough.

Here is Red Curve hanging on the studio wall along with six recent works that I'm still happy with. As you can see, although they are all frontal in composition, they are fairly different one from another. My problem with this new painting is that I thought it might be too different. It's not so much the composition, since I have been moving towards greater simplicity; it is more the scale, the relationship of the size of the shapes to the size of the panel, which here are larger than usual. The panel size is similar to those of the other paintings, but the forms within it are larger.

I hung two older paintings from 2011 alongside the new work. Both are smaller in size, but also smaller in scale: there are more forms and they are smaller. It's possible that Red Curve is too simple for me to adjust to right now, even though I know that's where I want to be heading. Or perhapst the image just isn't interesting or strong enough; I suppose I will see in time, as I make more work that has pared down imagery. What I do know is that I don't want to go back to more complex compositions, as seductive as they are; I want to move closer to a more non-objective vision, to a mysterious "what is this?".

Red Curve detail