Left Alone

These last few days distractions were more appealing to me than continuing to work on my painting of the lonely flip-flop left alone on a beach in SE Asia.  I am not sure why it is such a major challenge to be creative--to make something out of nothing!?  Seems as though it is so much easier to do familiar tasks:  washing dishes; organizing a drawer; driving someplace, talking on the phone, etc.  Nevertheless, when I finally hunkered down and began to splatter hundreds of drops of oil paint on the paper with my huge brush,  I became energized and forgot about the distractions.
The drops represent the sand but I chose not to cover the entire 55" x 55" piece of paper with these drops as I wanted to leave some mystery lurking on the perimeter of the work.  While painting,  I listened to lots of Leonard Cohen!
I finished the underside of the lone rubber flip-flop and really liked the result.  The colors used were those on my reference photo--blues, greens, yellows, black, brown, white, etc.  I figured all these colors were there because,  despite the fact the flip-flop had been tossed in the seas for what must have been a long time, colorful seaweed and other living organisms attached themselves to the sole and went on a journey with this piece of deserted trash.  My imagination went along for the ride!
At the point that I stopped working in order for the oil paint to dry,  I stepped back and ruefully noticed that the entire design on this large piece of paper seemed non-eventful.  My eye went only to the flipflop--and that was it!  Nothing more--something was missing--something was lacking.
My next blog will show you what I did to help allay the feeling of emptiness and aloneness.  For now, here are two photos of what I did recently.

Here is the full painting at this point:

Here is a close-up of the bottom of the flip-flop!