Oil on canvas board.
20" x 16"
The current layer of color was brushed on top of a greyscale painting done last week (which I forgot to take a photo of before starting to paint yesterday). I continued to poke at the painting for about 40 minutes after this picture was taken. It's one of the great thing about oils. Because of the extremely slow drying time* you can continue to manipulate the image for hours. Really until you are too tired to hold a brush anymore if you so choose.
And one of the worst things about oils (at least to me at the moment) is that you can continue to manipulate the image for hours if you so choose. Knowing when to stop can be difficult and it is possible to make the painting worse if you are not careful. In theatre you know when you have to stop working on the art; when the press sees it. I am finding it harder to make that determination with painting**.
* I read recently that conservators do not consider an oil painting completely dry until between 60 and 80 years after it has been completed. Which means I will more than likely be dead before any canvas I have done is completely dry.
** I am not the only one. One of the works on display in the Degas/ Cassatt exhibit at the National Gallery Of Art is a painting by Degas that he would not allow to be sold because he wanted to rework it. He did so for years and it was still in his studio at the time of his death.
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