Westward Ho! Sculpture at Yeatman's Cove in Cincinnati

Ever since I moved to Cincinnati, I've loved this statue downtown along Yeatman's Cove titled "Westward Ho!" Here's the latest on 12" x 12" canvas painted in oils with knives. I've ordered a dark brown floater frame to try with this. Once the paint dries, I have just a few more things I want to do with it before putting it out for sale at Final Friday March 29 at the Pendleton Art Center in Cincinnati. I'm also going to see what it looks like as a 20" x 20" giclee print.

I had to stop for a while after starting this on Feb 12 because the paint was so wet I needed to give it some time to dry before working on it more.

The photographs I took of it never inspired me like the real thing did. But when I saw it during a recent walk, I decided to work on it as a knife painting.

Rather than crop my horizontal photo, I just squeezed it in my mind to fit onto a 12" x 12" square canvas. Not displeased but still need to work on this some more as I continue to paint with knives and "traditional" (not water-missable) oils. 

Having painted in acrylics for so long, I've forgotten how much more time and patience it takes to paint with other media: watercolors, water-missable oil paints or traditional oils. The first day I started on this,  it took me half an hour just to get the caps off tubes that are still full of good paint, even though I haven't used them in years. Then I had to go and buy gloves to wear, because these paints were not going to clean up with water. And since I didn't have a palette handy, I painted over one of my acrylic paintings in neutral gray so I could use it as one.

I have an unfinished small acrylic painting of impatiens started during the Montgomery Garden Tour last summer. Think I may use it to play with some more knife painting. When I complimented one of our Brush & Palette Painters on her work that won a prize in the Women's Art Club of Cincinnati's Signature Show this year, she told me "the "quest" of experimenting while painting with knives is exhilarating and sometimes a disaster but, happily, sometimes not."