Letting go of The White Orchid Painting by Lizzy Summers

Around this time last year, one of my most beloved collectors, a true fan of mine, wanted me to do a commission. She wanted me to do a painting of the white orchid her son had given her for mothers day. This orchid is so lovely and continuously blooms to this day. A mirror reflection of the continuous bloom of love and friendship between adult son and mother. To paint the white orchid was an honor; I knew it’d be a challenge, but little did I know how much of a challenge it would be.

So much of a challenge that my collector ended up with an impressionistic scene of a field of daisies by a pond. Yes, a long way off from the orchid.

There is a moral to the story, and I’ll get to that in a bit. But this “bump” in my life as an artist was very humbling. Up until this point, no matter how bad I messed up a painting, I could let it dry and fix it, add something here or there; often it turned into an entirely different painting, but it felt done.

This one, the white orchid painting had no way of going back to a finished piece. The paint was crumbling off the canvas, like crumbling dried clay. The entire painting was cracking all over, like an unstable country with all the fault lines opening up, revealing the center of the earth. In this instance, the cracks peeled all the way down to the canvas.

This is layers and layers of paint… I clocked over 90 hours of tedious painting in shades of white. Hours and hours of layering to get different shades of white. Which was a red flag I should have admitted to myself before agreeing to the painting that I’ve never painted a monotone picture! I’m a very expressive colorist! 

Shocked from the start, the subtle changes of color variations of the white orchid proved very challenging for me; I would overshoot the warm, then I’d over shoot the cool, back and forth. It took way more time than a painting with my vivid and loud colors.

Arriving at my collector’s house after oil painting was hanging to dry…
In disbelief the painting crumbled before me. Like old sheet rock shedding onto the floor…
It was crazy. I returned home with the broken art.

In shock over the hours lost, I totally went into tail-tucked mode and didn’t get my paints out for quite a while. After thinking about all the possibilities of what could have happened, I had been experimenting with water-soluble paints. There must have been a mix up with original oils and water-soluble oils. The faster drying water-soluble oils must have cracked as the regular oil paint dried.
I still have the canvas. I can’t seem to let it go yet. Maybe I’ll turn it in to something else someday.

There’s something to learn from every painting. Even if it doesn’t turn out, I become wiser.
And I still have my super fan collector and she has a lovely new painting of daisies in a field by a pond. 

I am happy about the photo of that darn orchid. Even though I couldn’t turn it into a nice oil painting, I was able to turn it into a collectible accessory!

I love how it looks on this red handbag.  A collectable classy accessory to an evening out.