Megan Caldwell Chandler

Sometimes I finish a new piece and I think to myself, “no thanks.”  This week I experienced one such occasion.

To be fair, I don’t think this work is totally bad, or ugly, or stupid.  I just don’t care for it, which is a bummer because I had high hopes for this one.  I always do some kind of sketch for a piece beforehand, but usually my sketch is a quick thumbnail.  For this work, however, I actually took a bit of time to create a well crafted drawing.  I spent hours cutting and painting the moon shapes.  I created practice paintings that explored different color schemes.  And yet, with all this preparation, the final product makes me shrug.

All is not lost, however, for I think this shows at least a bit of mental progress on my part.  I used to get very agitated when my work didn’t turn out the way I imagined.  Case in point, this piece I created almost one year ago:

I wrote a post about this work and how frustrated I was with the whole thing. (You can read that post here.)  Here’s the kicker; a couple weeks ago when I was looking through all the work I had created in the past year, I came across this collage and was delighted.  I thought to myself, “Whoa!  You should frame this and hang it in your dining room!”  Perhaps another year will go by and I’ll return to my work and have a new appreciation.  Until then I think I’ll just hide this current painting in a closet and move on to new work.