Not so much a symphony really as a bunch of canvases in varying states of unfinishedness, because lately I am having no trouble starting a painting, but getting it to a point where I know it’s complete is a whole nother story.

There is also the fact that there seem to be three or four different artists living inside me and I have no control over which one is going to produce a painting at any given time.

Case in point; I lined up several of my paintings that include the sea {above} to see what was going on. As I suspected, they pretty much all look like they’ve been done by different people.

Also at least three of them are not finished but I simply do not know what they need. I don’t know how much I can really ‘control’ that, but I’m getting very tired of half-painted canvases hanging around for months on end.

Mind you, once they are finished they tend to just sit there anyway, but then I’m not really focusing on exhibiting them at the moment so I can hardly complain about that!

I’m not saying I’m not happy with these paintings; I love at least parts of all of them. I just can’t help longing for some consistency, and really no amount of being reassured that diversity is good, sameness gets boring etc etc will convince me because I feel unstable working like this.

I know an artist’s work develops and changes over time, and I can see evidence of that in my own work of course, but still after three years to be producing such inconsistent work! Gah. It bugs me.

And the whole not finishing paintings thing. It’s not restricted to paintings ~ projects, books, articles, all sorts of things are being started and not finished round here lately. No f0cus!

Ah well. This wasn’t supposed to be a big whinge. I am experiencing some frustration but I continue to paint and to love doing it, so maybe I just need to remember my word of the year and keeping walking through. In the meantime I’ll endeavour to finish some paintings so I can post all those drafts I’ve got waiting to publish!