After yesterday’s finishing marathon, today’s goal was to start putting in some time on my SMART goals from the Roaring 20’s workshop. For those of you (like me) that need a reminder, my SMART goals from my initial session were:

• Leave out some information
• Change something
• Define what emotion (in the beginning) I am trying paint. What is the personal connection to me?

I decided a few days ago that I wanted to use this reference photo to work with for the first month.

This was taken during my 2014 trip to Keeneland. It’s taken from the backside (stables) as the horses for the next race walk through to the saddling paddocks, where they will wait to go onto the track. You can see horses, people, race pageantry, the famous Keeneland sycamores, and shadows. It’s also a good memory for me as I savored the forbidden pleasure of “being backside” and seeing everything that the tourists didn’t see. It’s not a good enough photo to paint, but it does have enough information to suggest several paintings.

I sat down and did some thumbnails and a little journaling about what kind of emotion I’d like to showcase in the painting.

I’m not sure this counts as an emotion but the feeling I was trying to obtain was “transition.”

I decided not to do big paintings and not to use my best paper because this is still very experimental. These are my results.

Version 2 comes closest to what I was after, though not having a handler feels very awkward to me. I like version 4 as well, but I think I’ll try some more organic shapes for my next attempt. The squares give me the little bits of interest, but the lines just don’t seem quite right.

I’ve got a couple of weeks until the next critique, so I’ll keep plugging away.