"The Dining Room Wall Test"

Since I have been doing some paintings lately that are a bit larger than usual….for me. We have been giving them a test run on our dining room wall. Anything seems to look OK there….to me, but it is interesting how some paintings kind of grow on you….by that I mean my wife, Marilyn. Marilyn has become a pretty good critic, and help to me over the years, so she would not like to have just anything stuck on her dining room wall. I’m sure many artists do this, but I have never rotated paintings on my home walls that were going to galleries eventually.

The painting above, “Le jardin de Le Village” 24x30 oil on linen, and the painting below are good examples of what I mean. When I first finished the garden painting, I felt she was luke warm in her enthusiasm for the piece. We put it up to try it for a while, and after she lived with it for a time, I sensed that she was a little disappointed when I told her it was going to The Travis gallery. I think it is a nice way to get a feeling of how someone else might co-exist with your work. We had the “Walking the Ladies” below on the wall since January….that was long enough, so it went to the RSHanna Gallery, and hopefully will end up on someone else‘s wall eventually….maybe the dining room! If Marilyn got so attached to a painting that she wanted it, or could not part with it, I certainly would not take it away. She likes selling paintings as much as I do….thankfully! I do not do this with all of the smaller pieces that I paint. I actually do not have a large body of my own work in our home…..the studio is another story of course! The dining room spot is being occupied by “The Basket Weaver”(bottom photo) temporarily.

This is obviously not something that one necessarily needs to do, but I find it interesting, and it is a good little test. The one aspect of this test that was not mentioned is, what if you grow to hate the painting. Well then, at least there would be no problem parting with it. Thanks for listening to more of my ramblings.

Since January, it's been "Walking the Ladies"

"The Basket Weaver"

Temporarily occupies the spot