Blue turtle unfinished at stage III. Acrylic on canvas

Blue turtle has been sitting around the house as a background for almost a year while I drew the body of a turtle and tried to decide how to apply it. Visitor after visitor has gone looking for my work, discovered the blue turtle, and wondered why I considered myself an artist. It has been amusing at times.

There is danger of making the final work quite muddy when the  background is dark like this. It is a common mistake of a lot of struggling acrylics users. I remember going into the Supercentre at Tuggerah and there were half a dozen large shop spaces which had been let out to artists. I think all but one had their body of large works in acrylic and they were all disturbingly muddy and the colours without vitality. I like to think one thing I have learned to get from my acrylic work is vitality in the colour.

This work started quite easily being little more than a textured under-layer of medium but by stage II I could see something of a possibility hiding among the splashes and scrapes. In this painting I know there is the potential for a really beautiful final outcome and I hate it when that happens. The potential for beauty is lit large by an increasing potential to lose the spark among the busy surfaces.

There are several ways to proceed from this point. The surface can be built and the detail increased to be a complex forest floor with a turtle shell suggested among the colours and whorls of autumn. The shell can be built up of more abstracted detail so from a distance it is a detailed illustration of a shell and from close it is a riot of colour and shapes. The final one I can envision at the moment is to put the turtle on a bed of weed in such a manner that the eye is drawn back and forth to different physical depths (suggested not real) in the flora. I do not like the sprays of lighter green in the body but they will be drawn back into the overall look if I use the colours wisely. One wrong move and its back to mud again. I will stare at it for another six months before I touch it I guess. One very big consolation is that it has begun to look appealing hanging on the wall. I do love hanging new things around the place.

I am still unable to lie horizontally without difficulty but getting up from chairs has become easier and as long as I do not cough, sneeze or hiccup I am able to breath deeply enough to be comfortable.

Midnight: Crushing depression.