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Monday, March 26, 2012

Molly, Horse Painting, "Equine Oil Painting" by Marina Petro


Molly
20" x 20" Oil on canvas
Commissioned
SOLD
Good golly Miss Molly! I had quite a ride completing this portrait. It was commissioned by a collector who purchased quite a few of my angel paintings and intuitively created pieces over the years. I've repainted Molly countless times until I was able to complete the painting as depicted here.

Molly's owner wanted me to paint the piece intuitively as I usually do. Well, Molly had a totally different take on the process. When I began the painting, I kept 'hearing' Molly say...."I want to see the sunset" over and over....and I was getting impressions of a VERY intense sunset. Now mind you, this is what the horse wanted, but the painting was not going to hang in her stall.

I completed the painting (I thought) in December and emailed a picture of it to Molly's mommy. Mommy thought the sunset was too intense and wanted me to soften it. So now, what do I do? My resistance had cemented itself firmly and it was extremely difficult for me to even walk into my studio to work on the painting.

Molly wants intensity and Mommy wants softness. Painting light over dark with oils is a difficult task...hard to restore the luminosity I wanted. So, I painted over the background around the horse with a quick drying white paint and began to work on the background from scratch ... again....and again...and again.... Whenever I tried to work in softer colors, I automatically, messed up with spontaneously applying deeper colors. It was like nothing I'd ever experienced before. To make a very long story short......I ended up painting it over a zillion times until I finally felt the painting was satisfactory. I emailed the completed pic to Molly's mommy and yes, I held my breath because I was about to give up on the whole thing it if she didn't like it.  My friends and family were at the point of disowning me....

Great relief when her feedback came back that "I captured Molly's soul" and she loved the painting. She said that she could actually "feel" Molly in the picture. So that's the story....and I am happy again!
.....and glad I didn't follow the advice in the quotation below....

Today's Quotation: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it." 
-W. C. Fields

1 comment:

Lise said...

Marina, I caught this on facebook. Nice painting! The horse has personality!

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