"Amy in the Studio"

Oil on double primed grey board - 11" x 17"

Everyone dreams of finding a lost Rembrandt at a yard sale, an undiscovered Vermeer in a dusty corner of a thrift store, a forgotten Dürer etching sandwiched in the pages of a second hand book. While this painting of Amy isn't quite so lofty, it did resurface today, clipped to a forgotten drawing board, to help me in my hour of need. You see, I was having "one of those days" in the studio today where I just couldn't focus. Being an artist is a dream job, if you can call it work. There are worse fates than being excited about what you do on a day to day basis, and can make a living off of it. However, the business of making and selling art is more than standing at the easel and I had let a lot of the prep and paperwork slide. Today I decided to clear away the piles of unread mail, answer some long overdue correspondence and reevaluate the hundreds of files of ever-growing reference material.   

  I'm not sure of the date of this oil sketch.  It is a couple of years old.  I found it clipped to a drawing board behind a stack of paintings.  I remember deliberately painting it on a piece of primed grey backing board so I wouldn't be tempted to get fussy with it (Oops, oh well).  The loose, sketchy nude is the Holy Grail for me.  Oh, how I envy those who can splash around in the paint.  It is the curse of the ex-photo-realist; the inability to fully let go and have fun with the paint, come what may. Though not exactly archival, I figured if cardboard was good enough for Toulouse-Lautrec, it is good enough for me.  If you arrived here from the daily painters site to consider buying this piece, you should consider this: the image is 11" x 17" painted on a 16" x 20" board.  It can be framed and matted or cut down and framed edge to edge.  Some framers are loathe (and rightly so) to cut up someone else's artwork. I will me glad to do that before it leaves the studio.

Here is what it looks like in the raw, as it were.: