How Blurry Can You Get?

Today I got the idea to see just how little detail I could get away with in a painting. This isn't a successful painting - I think that if there is very little representational definition, there has to be something else to carry the painting along. It has to be about brush strokes, or color or texture o or something. I do have to say though, that the actual painting looks better than the photo. Cameras with automatic focus have a very hard time figuring out what to do with flat surfaces to start with, and when it's a blurry flat surface maybe it only adds to their confusion. I actually did this painting yesterday, but made changes to it today. Yeah - made it even more indistinct. But I also changed two very important lines. The green triangle to the left wasn't there; it use to be just a downward-curved line, as was the small yellow patch above it. Together they made the painting look like it was a sagging hammock! Such small effects can make such an impact on whether or not a painting works.

My other painting task for today was to rework this painting from a couple of days ago. I started reworking it yesterday but after I finished painting for the day and had another look at the supposedly-finished version, I realized that those two white objects in the foreground fought with everything else in the painting, for at least two reasons. First of all, their placement drew the eye away from everything else in the painting, and the painting isn't about these objects, it's about the light behind the tree. Another reason they didn't work was that because of their scale in the painting, they couldn't be made to look like anything recognizable unless the brushwork was very different from the brushwork in the rest of the painting. Large objects in the painting - especially in a small painting (this one is 8x10 inches) - are more easily represented with loose brushwork. But this doesn't work for small objects. The rest of the painting doesn't depend on detail to carry itself along; it depends on color and texture. This works because the objects are so readily recognizable that they only have to be suggested. But the bus stop shelter and the edge of the bridge need to be more clearly defined if they are going to be recognizable at all. And there lies the problem: if they are clearly defined enough to show what they are, then they are in a completely different style than the rest of the painting. If I leave them undefined, or make them less defined, to match the rest of the painting, they look like intrusive blotches of color. So, they got the chop.