Strange Catch

Strange Catch was painted for my older sister's birthday in 2014. Embarrassingly, I spent over a year on this thing, constantly tweaking, readjusting, restarting passages… The need to set hard and fast deadlines, even for paintings that are not tied to any income, has never been more apparent than when I blew through the first deadline (my sister's birthday) and suddenly found myself working on this painting a year later.

A lot of smaller mistakes contributed to the large problem: blasting through the initial planning phase too soon, not gathering enough reference, etc. Nevertheless, without that deadline, the temptation to attempt perfection becomes too great. One thing I constantly need to remind myself is that I'll never paint the perfect image. Maybe I should rephrase that: I'll always be improving. (That's the goal, anyway.)