Work-Life Balance

As I mentioned before, the last few weeks were particularly busy in my professional (non-art) life. The idea I had in my mind was to work towards this deadline this week and then things would ease up a little bit and this would be really necessary because I'm literally working myself to pieces right now. I don't want to go into details but let's just say that after a certain meeting today it doesn't look like the pressure will lessen soon.

So with that in mind I went to my painting class. And - surprisingly - I had a really good painting session and I produced my first piece in week that I can actually show to people without being totally embrarrassed... It might have to do with the fact that I was at least under the illusion the pressure would be off for a while. Or maybe because I'm starting to get used to sleeping much less than my body needs, day after day? Who knows. Fact is that I was in a really good mood and the landscape we were working on came out really nice.

The only thing that bugged me a bit is that I felt it was a bit too smooth and bland and a bit too pretty. I wanted to put something into the foreground. The problem with that was that it redefined the space in the piece. At first it was a vast empty space. The moment I put something in the front, the space shrunk significantly. In a first attempt to keep the space large I put in a sandy plain but that didn't really work, so I planted trees in front of that. That worked, but of course now the space was significantly more compact. It worked OK, after all, but now the piece was seriously out of balance. The sky on the top right appeared too heavy so I started to lighten and smooth it (Don's suggestion which was a really good one). But the piece was still out of balance. Don suggested maybe a single tree on the side. I was hesitant to do that for a number of reasons, but in the end I did relent, grabbed the palette knife and plastered the present tree (along with all it's - erm - decorations) on the right. And that actually works pretty well.

Now it's not a pleasant landscape any more but a dark symbolic piece. However, given my work situation I felt as if my subconscious had spoken... and I decided to call the piece "Work-Life Balance" (which is a term invented by large corporations to rub in the fact that you don't have a life and whatever else you might have is out of balance...)