The Best Idea I Never Had!

So, this is the story of the best idea I never had!

A couple of days ago, fellow artist Carney Oudendag brought some of her paintings to my studio to be photographed.  I met Carney at last year’s Lake Country Art Walk in one of those 15-minute Paint Off’s. As I was processing her images on my computer, we were chatting about this year’s upcoming Art Walk and about doing demos for OPUS and other art organizations. I mentioned that I had a stack of unfinished demo paintings.

While she was waiting for me to finish, Carney started to look through my stack of rejects.  “These are really quite good – for demo paintings” she says in a bright cheery voice.  While I was trying to figure out how to process that, she brings three out. They are each pretty much of the same section of the same tree.

I quite like these three but felt they didn’t stand up as individual paintings.  When I demo, I like to have the same image in different stages of development so I can demonstrate a wider range of techniques but individually – I didn’t know if they are all that interesting.

Then Carney did an amazing thing! 

She stacked up the three paintings one above the other and declared “look, a triptych!”

I was dumbfounded.  I had never thought of doing that.  And what was really amazing was how well the three paintings fit together to make a quite impressive larger painting. Obviously, it needs some work to pull it all together but the potential is there.

As artists, we tend to work in isolation, painting away by ourselves in our studios.  But this is what can happen when two creative minds meet!

So, I have two questions for you:

1. Should I put these paintings together and complete the triptych?
2. For those artists working alone out there – will you invite someone in to take a look?