The Revamp - Improving My Painting "Small Talk"

I often go back to an earlier picture and revamp it. I'll change the color of a wall, for instance, or a girl's dress. Sometimes I just know when something isn't quite right.  If something  doesn't sell over a period of time, I question what the problem is. It can't be price, because I try my best to be reasonable. Certainly few artists recoup the time they spend on their art, and few expect to. We love what we do, and all we ask is that you love it too, enough to want to own it.

So I took my picture, "Small Talk", completed (I thought) in February, and added some more details. The Before and After pictures are below. I think it works much better now.




Before, with closed windows.



After, with open window and two young girls phone-chatting.

This is something I do all the time during the novel-writing, of course. In fact, it's exactly how I  produce a book. And we are never satisfied - always needing to add a bit more, tweak a paragraph or two. Right up until a book is published, I'm sure there are writers still longing to check out that third paragraph on page 201 that wasn't quite perfect.

And I do exactly the same thing with my paintings. I won't bore you with all the other revamps I've done to my work over the years, but there must have been a couple of dozen. And you will never know how many I've simply painted over completely, with a base of white paint, and done something brand new. Waste not, want not. Canvases are too expensive to be lying idle in the cupboard.