Are You Still Painting ___________ (fill in the blank)?

Lobster Buoys by Marian Dioguardi c2015 , 30 x 30 inches

In the movie about J.M.W.Turner another artist asks Turner whether he is still painting "marine scenes".  This seems to always be meant as a slightly pejorative and derisive question when asked by one painter to another. Somehow it has come to mean "the same old thing". 

Why would that matter? After all one man's junk is another man's treasure. So it goes with paintings. Sometimes a painter just hits on his/her personal gold and wants to keep digging deeper with every painting . Other painters never quite find what they are looking for and continually scratch the surface, changing technique, subject and directions. In the end, none of that matters because a painter has to paint what a painter has to paint. 

When I saw this pile of old buoys in Maine, I certainly felt as if I had struck a trove of color and texture that I wanted to mine. And so it goes ...one painting leading to the the next. 

Yes, I am still painting buoys.