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Art is play. It is also a lot of work. However, the fun in the work is trying something new.

Or retrying something old.

Or trying something new on top of something old.

This piece is one of the latter. The base painting, a swath of comforting pink covered in gold “feathers” taunted me for a year or so. Although I loved the texture I created by heating the wax and drawing it down using short strokes of a palette knife, and I was fascinated by thedaubs of glittering gold, it lacked focus; it lacked punch.

The beauty of the piece lay in my choice of mediums: the soft nature of the wax, the matte look of the oil paint, and the brilliance and changeability of the interference pigments that create that feeling of feathers. But those attributes were not enough to move it from a pleasing painting to an interesting one.

Then I had a thought (always a dangerous moment!)

To amplify the aviary direction I had inadvertently*created, I added an X—the simplified shape of bird’s wings—to create a point of focus. But that wasn’t quite enough, it needed more, as my mother would say, zing. So I ran a landing strip of contrasting white underneath the center of the cross to move the viewer’s eye directly into themiddle of the piece. This bold move created a dynamic space in the painting from which one’s eye moves outward.

Fini.

* Because I create extemporaneously, the work often creates itself—where I am the medium through which the ideas take shape and come into reality.