Climbing a Hill

Learning to paint is like climbing a hill and never suspecting that there is no summit. All week I've been working throughout the day on my latest picture. It's about half complete in the underpainting stage but it's hard to say how it will turn out. The whole thing so far in in white, black, lemon yellow and brown. The yellow makes the adjoining grey look like purple, thus the art of the colourist is revealed; not to paint an absolute colour but a relative one. I'm faced with at least one more tiring week of this underpainting, and I probably won't like the final picture anyway. As soon as I'm content with a picture painted in this way, it's time to learn a new technique, and perhaps realise that learning my original one wasn't necessary. There is no summit but there are many hills to try.