In the past year and a bit since I started this weekly blogging thing, I have mostly shared by successes. My painting successes that is. In other words, most of the paintings I’ve shown in the blog have been ones that I was happy with. This is not always the case as on a couple of occasions I’ve shared the odd failure. I did this most recently in this post: Game of Lannister or How the Hell did THAT Happen?, in which I discussed how much trouble I had with my painting of Tyrion Lannister and I shared a failed version of the painting.
Last week I did a painting of the great John Cleese as possibly his greatest character, Basil Fawlty. I had a lot of fun painting it, but I was slightly worried that he wasn’t recognizable because I had pushed this one in my Cubo-Weirdist way. The mouth is not realistic at all and one of the eyes is a little large. Not that any of that is unusual for me, but I thought maybe I had pushed it a little too far, I suppose mainly because of the aforementioned mouth. But I showed it to some friends and family and everyone knew who it was.
It’s one of those things though, even if it wasn’t recognizable, I think I would have considered it a successful painting anyway, simply because I think it’s a good painting! And that’s actually unusual. In the past if I’ve finished a painting and it doesn’t look like the the subject I was trying to capture, I also don’t consider it to be a very good painting. Maybe that’s because, as I go along in the process I know it doesn’t look right, so maybe I just go through the motions? Anyway, I didn’t do that this time, so maybe this one is a lesson in not giving up, even if I just seem to be giving up subconsciously.
On another note, you’ll notice that I went back to the 1970s for this painting. I decided to do this painting because, well, I think it was inevitable that I would paint Basil. He is the main character of perhaps the greatest sitcom of all time. And definitely my favourite. And this is certainly not the first time I’ve gone back to the 70s. After all there are a lot of iconic characters from pop culture during that era. But it got me wondering: am I running out of 21st Century Pop Culture references? I mean, you’d think this whole thing would be endless, but it’s getting harder and harder to come up with new ideas for paintings. Hmmm, maybe the answer is–wait for it–more sitcom characters! That’s a niche I’ve barely touched on! But please if you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments or on Instagram. There is a very good chance you’ll see your suggestion on my website or on my Instagram feed! See you next week!