I painted Sentiment in late '06, sort of as a tribute to a series of paintings that I had done in 2004. That series has no official name, I just refer to it as the "Jumble" series, as Jumble was the first painting in that idea or style. Interestingly, Jumble was a painting that I very nearly painted over. It was one of those "magic" paintings, the kind that practically paint themselves, and it was fun to paint, but it didn't look like "me" for whatever reason and I had determined that it wasn't any good. It had gone too smoothly, I didn’t know where else to take it and it didn’t seem right that a painting that had only taken a couple of hours could be considered “finished”. I had started on a different canvas when my sister Dianne came by my studio one afternoon to see what I was working on. She pointed at Jumble, which had been tossed to the side and exclaimed that she loved that one! Oh no, I said, that one is bad and must be painted over. She said, “no way, I’m buying it from you”. I felt bad, the painting really wasn’t anything to me at the time. How could I charge my own sister the $200 I was asking for such paintings at the time? Really, I said, let me try to sell it on eBay (this was back when I did such things) and it probably won’t sell and then you can have it if you buy me a new canvas. She said yes, but probably it would sell and boy did it ever! My reserve price for 24” squares on eBay at that time was $200 and this one got itself into a little bidding war. Not just between two bidders, but three or four. The high bid was $340 which was the highest amount I had ever received for one of my paintings on eBay until that time and I just couldn’t believe it.
Jumble, 24” x 24”, acrylic on canvas, 2004
Hmmm, there was something there. People seemed to like little Jumble! Maybe I should paint more of them. So I did. The next one went for $425! These were pretty hefty prices for a new, unknown artist on eBay back in those days. I painted a couple more after that and they all sold, Lost & Found fetching me the highest price of $600 on Gallery Today.
More in the “Jumble” series:
All of those paintings were fun to paint and I don’t know why I stopped them after just a few, or why I never titled series. I sometimes think about doing something with it again and maybe I should, since I’ve gotten a bit stuck and don’t know what to paint right now. It seems that this series is just as good an idea as any other I’m currently considering. Maybe Sentiment is trying to tell me something. In any case, it is now on its way to Connecticut.
No comments:
Post a Comment