Painting a Clothesline

This all started with a wonderful e-mail from a lovely woman who saw my clothesline painting in the Toronto Globe and Mail as an illustration for an article on air drying clothes (yup, I hang out my laundry to dry whenever possible. It saves energy and just looks beautiful to me..again how to transform a dismal chore into something beautiful. I consider it an art installation).

After a bit of back and forth I decided that I wanted to paint large clothesline paintings and she decided that she was interested in owning one. She referenced one of my paintings as her favorite. I then went into my references from my December trip to Venice and I did a drawing for her. We were off to a good start. But oops, some how we were talking about two different paintings. Her favorite painting was clothing against a GREEN wall. I thought she had referred to a clothesline against a BLUE wall and there was a day in which I had spent six hours mixing blues, scraping them off and trying to get them right (sort of).

Blue, for me, is a very difficult color to mix for a wall being hit with sunlight. If it's a clear blue wall, you really can't use yellow because it turns the wall green and doesn't give you that bright blue feeling, at all. I have been able to do a good blue mix but it is always after so much work and revision. I always feel that it is a struggle. So I was relieved when my client told me that she had never wanted it BLUE and it was the GREEN she spoke of all along. I love painting greens. Easy on the eye and a wide range of greens-blues, reds, yellows and white to play with and get that warm lit feeling. Hooray. So after getting our green references on the same page I have started to paint again.

I can see that there will still be many revisions of clothing color and shapes and elements but I do love the way it is shaping up, Getting the "green light" to go on this definitely brought more joy into it. Stay tuned to see the green revision post.