When you're a kid you just always assume things will always be as they are. As you get older, you realize that nothing is so constant as change. I have seen so many local landmarks disappear in my lifetime. I thought it might be nice to try to capture some of them before they too disappear. This is of course The Derby bar/restaurant on western Main Street in Poughkeepsie.
A second reason for doing this work is that I thought it would have an obvious potential buyer; the owner of The Derby. Who wouldn't want an original painting of their business, right?
The painting is extremely "tight", probably more than I like. That is to say I sacrificed some "painterly" quality and instead went for as much realism as I could achieve. If you compare this to the defunct drive-in, for example, you will see what I mean. This is also a good example of why doing landscapes is so much easier. I had to adhere pretty strictly to my photographic reference or this just wouldn't look correct.
I was pretty impressed with myself when I did this. Now, a couple of months on, I am not so impressed. I definitely want to loosen up next time. I used to be very impressed with hyper-realism and photo-realism. In these styles, a painting will have extremely sharp, photographic realism. I have (I think) matured to now believe that a simple photograph achieves this. What a painting does is depict something in a way that is not a photograph. It can incorporate elements that photographs fail to capture.
So the challenge now will be to depict realism but in a painterly manner.
Incidentally I have this weird thing where I get insomnia about once a week. I just don't get tired enough to fall asleep and I end up awake all night and into the next day. The Derby was done on one of those overnights. The higher realism takes a lot of time to do.
I might try to paint this again sometime.
