"Mau Loa" (Forever)

"Mau Loa" (Forever)  (Watercolor, 8" x 10")  © C. Eastwood 2016

"Mau Loa" (which means "forever") was a commissioned piece that took almost forever to actually paint.  I was humming right along with the painting when life was diverted down another track due to a leak under the slab of our house.  In my haste to pack everything up so that work could be done to repair the damage, I neglected to hold out any of my painting supplies or work-in-progress.  While frustrated, there wasn't a thing I could do about it because it was one of a vast number of boxes stacked with furniture into a three-dimensional puzzle of a mountain covered by tarps filling our garage.  Little did I dream that it would be almost three months later before I would be able to pick the work back up and complete it.

I was in the midst of trying some new techniques, which had just really started to fall into place, when the hiatus hit.  So incredibly frustrating and, once everything was unpacked again, frightening. What if I couldn't remember what I was doing???  What if I'd forgotten how to paint???  What if I ruined what I'd already done???  It's amazing the places your head can go and the level of anxiety those trips can produce.

One of the new techniques was to have escaped edges (my terminology) where part of the images escape the edges of the the boundary created by the painting.  I'm sure there's a proper term for this -- I just don't happen to know what it is, nor am I curious enough to research it.  I'm happy with the results and will probably do this again on some future paintings when the subject matter lends itself to this technique.

But I'm happy to report that I was able to complete the work and it is already off to it's new home.

Time to start a new painting!