And Repeat...

While there's no shortage of subjects to paint, painting the same thing a few times can be fascinating. For me painting outside there are usually choices made on the hoof that could as easily have have been made another way, and repeating a subject lets some of the options be explored. As Yogi Berra allegedly recommended, "When you come to a fork. in the road, take both!", -well, if you paint a subject more than once you can (just not on the same sheet of paper). Sometimes it's more explicitly a case of "Oh, that didn't work!" so there's a need to try a different approach, and for the way I like to paint watercolour it's often the case that starting again is the quickest way out of a hole.

These three paintings of Monymusk House, Aberdeenshire were painted as demonstration paintings from the same reference photo, on different days and to different groups. Each time I started with blank paper and had about an hour to 75 minutes to paint, while trying to describe what I'm doing as I go. It's huge fun (for me at least!) and the time goes by in a blink. The paintings were chronologically left to right, and each is a half imperial (22x15").

What interests me afterwards is what has gone well and what hasn't. Most painters will recognise having bits in a painting you like, bits that are OK and bits that you're not really (or remotely) happy with. The lesson I find in repeating watercolours is that these categories of bits can turn out differently each time. Sometimes there's a positive transfer of learning from one painting to the next, but sometimes the "happy accident" doesn't occur again. Sometimes a penny drops and you realise your technique has improved; sometimes you remind yourself just in time what goes wrong when you do it that way. Rather than depress me though I find this liberating. I do realise that if we had complete mastery of the medium this wouldn't happen and all the bits would be especially good, but life would be much duller!.

Happy Painting!