JANINE GOOD

 Original version of Blue Girl,  Acrylic on canvas 101x125cm

Included in Uncomfortable Terrain exhibition at Montsalvat

Repainted to become Melancholy Beach 1

MELANCHOLY BEACH - BLUE GIRL

“Have no fear of perfection,

you’ll never reach it”     _Salvador Dali

Melancholy Beach, 2017 Oil on canvas 101x125cm

Exhibited at Arc Yinnar Gallery Summer Sizzler Exhibition 2017

Private Collection

Facing the Storm 2021

Oil on canvas 60x45cm

Despite Dali’s warning, some ideas don’t always work well in the beginning. I initially wanted to explore the idea of using bright colour for a sombre theme similar to how Country Music often combines depressing lyrics with bright sounding music. I was never completely happy with Blue Girl so I decided to rework over the Acrylic with Oil paint.  

In hindsight maybe I should have started a new canvas!

But too often today I see half done paintings that could be better but artists aren’t willing to take the risk or spend the time. Anyway I think the final result above was worth the risk. The challenge is to do the extra work without “overworking” it and making it stale.

I wanted to bring more light into the background and made the decision to open up the trees behind enabling me to carry some of the line-work of the figure’s hair across the composition.

But in the end I decided that wasn’t going far enough - that the foreground figure was too dominant so I removed her, inserting 2 new figures and adding some dunes, for a more satisfying result.

I was still intrigued by the figure’s expression, a face of sadness, hard to capture because the difference between nailing this is millimetres. so I repainted her on a separate canvas.