Oil on Canvas – “Plaza Theatre”

36” x 24”

Burnt down the day the banks crashed, Black Friday. Fixed up and put to use for a few decades. Then razed. Now there’s just flowers there.

saturation and defining the foreground scale, automobile clean-up, wooden branches. Now it needs to dry. I have to wait a week. I need wet on dry.

The theatre had a balcony and an upper balcony. The fitting room for shows was off-stage. The facade had large Corinthian columns and a 48-foot lobby.

can’t leave it alone

So I drank too much coffee yesterday and painted late into the night, details.

So, look at the building on the left. Its perspective is incorrect. I worked on that. I took the sunset out of the window reflections. I want to fill the foreground with flowers, but the left side of the painting is flat.

The tone is wrong, but the redraw is passable. I will go back over the sky once the profile is defined. The building hue will be a neutral light grey, a white in the distance. I used the car windows to give me a tone. This sets me back three days. The rest of the painting, save for some tacky globs, is dry. I will be putting in defined flowers. I needed a thicker and smoother underlay than the gessoed canvas.

Then, I added a crush on flowers. Hi, flowers. Even the building blushed. Lots of flowers. Hours of flowers.

literally had trouble sleeping waiting for this to dry a toy so I could pull the brush on feature petals. Finished, for all tents and porpoises.

I go through the final phase which is a series of false finishes. I step back, I get rest, I come back to it and find flaws. The background tree line was in Autumn , but the foreground was Spring. So, I fixed the foreground. I improved the flowers, got deeper into the painting, the bricks, the overgrowth entering the bandos.