Keeping On

I'm still working on painting those 100 paintings. Thank goodness I joined the challenge otherwise I would find excuses not to paint. So, the idea to be accountable to someone or something else works.

It's like when you are in school and expected to come to class prepared. The possibility of failure is up close and personal. Not so when you're working on your own. Who's going to grade me? No one, but myself. And I could give myself a pass instead of a fail.

Independent study might not be my forte. In my last year in college I had a painting class at which the professor did not hold regular hours. You had to paint on your own and attend one class a month. You can just imagine how that went. I was wasting time until I received the notice when class would meet and then Bam! I had to get on it.

I pulled out my 5ft roll of canvas, kicked it out on my basement floor and where it stopped I cut it and painted. At the time I was working in oils doing color studies using a limited palette of three colors. Abstract work, mixing the amounts of colors to see how many I could get from those three in a cloudy-like design.

Working all day and into the late night, I painted until I filled eight feet of canvas. Needless to say, my professor was impressed. After all, he told me to paint bigger! I knew I could do that, I just needed the time frame.

Pebble and Bits (c)2011 Dora Sislian Themelis
9x12 Watercolor on Arches paper

All these years later I'm still the same person I was back then. I need to be accountable and have a time frame. I guess that's why twenty minutes does the trick along with this challenge.