I started a pastel painting of a sprig of dogwood flowers several weeks ago, while I was cat sitting THREE cats. As someone not terribly familiar with cats, it feels necessary to point out the quantity of felines I was babysitting. THREE.

As a relative newbie to cats, I was surprised at how sociable they were–almost like dogs in some ways, to my way of thinking. They were playful, demanding of treats and playtime, and took turns being cat lap rugs. In between these times they engaged in what I think of as more cat-like behavior–for example, looking at me with disdain when I approached to pet them. I listened to their nonverbals and left them alone at those times, episodes of “My Cat From Hell” coming to mind. The youngest cat seemed slightly psycho, demanding the most intense petting sessions and at other times fleeing in what looked like sheer terror if I simply came anywhere near her when she wasn’t asking for attention.

If you saw my last post, you’ll see that the Big Boy cat sat on my work-in-progress, the dogwood flowers I was working on in pastels. Considering how hard I was struggling to capture the details of that first flower, I think that my high anxiety when Big Boy copped a squat is understandable. I decided that it was best to finish the painting when I got home.

From the many blogs I’ve read on art and writing, apparently I’m not the only creative type to struggle to finish a piece, for a myriad of reasons. Life got busy, stuff too packed away to get to easily, not sure it was that good anyway, etc.

Below is where I left off at the cat house:

I was pretty happy with how it turned out, but it took me a couple of hours to get to this point, and I had a whole painting to go. Honestly, I wasn’t excited about spending hours and hours on it.

However, a couple of weeks later I forced myself to sit down and work on a second flower. I told myself I only had to do one. At this rate, my painting of these spring flowers I’d photographed might be done by the falling of the leaves, but oh well. Here is round two:

I worked a little more on the first flower, adding highlights, and worked a little more on the background. I still wasn’t sure about why I was even spending time on this, but I don’t like to leave things half-finished, so I decided I’d give it another go later.

Later came, and with it an impatience to finish the thing. So I sat at it a couple of days in a row, a couple of hours at a time, drawing in flowers, tweaking colors, extending the background, and finally got to the point where I’m calling it finished.

With each flower, my attention to detail became less and less, despite my best efforts to push back against this tendency. I finally decided to not worry about it.

I’ve decided that the first flower I painted is the star of the show, and the other flowers are support cast. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

It’s finished, anyway, and I’m feeling pretty good about it. I haven’t painted flowers in a long, long time, so I was happy it came out as good as it did.

On to finishing other half-done works-in-progress–two small dogs in seascapes paintings in acrylics, and another seascape of a sunset with a silhouette of a pier in black, this in pastels. I’ve left the hardest parts, the dogs and the pier to work on.

Updates to follow.