It all started with a blank canvas; the possibilities were endless. There wasn’t a #2 pencil in sight to draw any outlines and I had the free reign to go wherever my crazy mind desired. The color that got the process rolling was Green. Next up were the basics – blue, yellow and red which I craftily distributed in a well-constructed yet random manner like so:

This version rests in peace. It is my favorite and I will never get it back because I had to go ahead and ruin it with MORE paint. Perhaps it was the little amount of time that I spent on it that made me believe I had to do more to it in order for it to be considered ‘finished’; I don’t know. I guess it seemed silly or unrealistic to me that such an awesome piece of art took a little under 14 minutes to complete so instead of accepting it as such, I just continued on lathering more layers, thinking that I could make it even better. Wrong.

Red, Blue Green; more, more, more; in various places contradicting one another again and again… Then, thinking I could bring back the edge that was so wonderfully displayed with red before, I splattered some white on top of it all. It turned out too white so I covered it up with more colors, crisscrossing them amongst one another; I was growing more and more annoyed at the fact that I didn’t just leave it alone.

It wasn’t working… So I resorted to Black.

Everyone knows that you have to be very careful with Black as it is the most dominant of ‘colors’ and will basically swallow everything whole if you let yourself get carried away with it. For the next half hour or so, I’m not sure what took place. All I know is I kept drinking wine; adding another layer of ‘life’ to my painting with every sip; a layer that it neither asked for nor needed. Soon enough, I somehow ended up with this:

Needless to say it doesn’t resemble the original… Or make it better in any way at all….

In fact, it looked more like that which you find in a baby’s diaper. I wasn’t happy. I was sad. Why couldn’t I just leave it the hell alone when it was SO, so good? Attempting to give it some ‘life’ I added Bronze and Green, but to no avail.

It still looks like a toddler threw up all over my canvas. I’m torn between keeping it as a reminder to “Stop While You’re Ahead” or destroying it completely; painting it with white and starting over, with a blank canvas.