Art as Life as art

So there's this painting I've just started. That's not a new thing, it's what I do for a living, but this one's interesting in that it brings together a number of threads both in my life and in the themes I've been exploring in the last while.

It gets a bit complicated so I won't go into all that now, but I've always found the process by which a painting comes into the world a fascinating one. Often the end result is quite unlike what I first thought of, and I've noticed that while my 'manager' mind is busy grappling with layout and light and shadow and so on something else is busy with its own project in the background, and very often this reflects what's going on in my inner life.

The end product of this dance might be something I'm unable to explain, just a feeling that comes off the canvas, and one of the fulfilling things about this artist gig is that it's this inexplicable feeling that people respond to, even when it seems to be quite dark.

So anyway, here's the digital layout of this new painting. It's based on a shot I took some time ago of a lovely young woman and as such runs the risk of becoming like a silly love song. This kept on bugging me but the subject would not go away so I started it yesterday.

One of the themes I've been toying with in the last while is rock art or cave painting. I've done one piece in that style but found it so unlike my other work  that it took some time to realise that I could add nothing more because it was in fact finished. So the line of animals here is that thread looking for a way to come to the main party.

Here's the first sketch of it on canvas, and already the journey has begun, with the animals beginning to morph away from horse and towards generic beast with mythical undertones.

The horse at the far left is my homage to the ancient genius of Lascaux, but the rest are drawn from little sketches I did deliberately without using reference, as would have been the case then. I'm interested in the animal above the first horse as its head suggests Thoth, the ibis-headed god of ancient Egypt.

I love the freshness of the paint as it lands on the canvas at this stage and was tempted to leave it like that but it's going to be one of those things that get sacrificed to the painting as a whole. Perhaps it will find it's way to the end product.