The perils of painting over the top of finished work

I have a big exhibition coming up this month here in France.  That is, it feels big to me, because I seem to have been preparing for it for weeks.  It will be the first time I have had a proper exhibition of my work here and for that reason I suppose it is somewhat more nerve wracking than usual !  Mind you up until a month ago I had been quite laid back about it. Of course, I thought, I had loads of work ready….but needless to say when it came to looking at it again, it wasn’t that simple !

Part of the challenge this time is exhibiting with two other ‘Brits’ who are really very good, begging the question : is my work going to stand up beside theirs ? And so when I got down to getting the work out to see what I was going to exhibit, my heart sank and I was into some knock out rounds once again with my obnoxious internal critic who was naturally having a field day making unhelpful comments like : « huh, call yourself an artist !  Who’s going to look twice at this lot ! etc » 

That’s when things could have got a bit tricky, as I decided that I didn’t have nearly enough work I was remotely happy with and didn’t have time to produce anything new - so it boiled down to that old chestnut : « What can I alter ?» Well, that can be fatal, but many’s the artist who has fallen prey to that particular vice. And no, it doesn’t always work, in fact quite often it is the exact opposite, particularly, if you keep a photographic record of your work and looking back realise that what you had before was actually inifinitely better.

To give you an idea of some of the dramatic changes that have been taking place, the image at the top of this page used to look like this:

 and here's another one that moved from hot to cold:

But perhaps even more extreme, this image from a blog I wrote in March has transformed into something quite different and still niggles me!