Recently, I had opportunity to work with artist Christine LaFuente in a workshop. The time and hopes spent to get there, be there, well worth it as she remains a generous teacher. The group of students gathered were each ready to dive in. Chris gave guidelines on composing with accuracy, and since we were all abstracting, that was an interesting conundrum to me. Is abstraction ever accurate? Does it need to be? One of the students is a professional photographer, and she often painted next to me; I loved her sense of humor. But it was really interesting to me how she needed her view to be perfect before she could start, before she would “click the shutter” into a set up. I may be way more sloppy then, but it seems to me that an artist’s job is to take the mess of stuff before me and rearrange into a new imagination of my own making. Back to Christine’s admonition about accuracy. . .

So, I worked on this idea, and gained some new tricks. Here is a shot of an under painting, begun with a grid for accuracy of proportions.

Then the finished result, painted within an hour or two on top of the under painting.

Christine says about this necessary beginning: “get it right at the start, take time there, or you will just be decorating your own mistakes.”