As an artist I love looking back on work I’ve done to see how my style has changed and progressed over the years. I’ve always been diligent about taking pictures and documenting paintings and projects but there are a few that got away. I refer to them as my “lost paintings.” I know other artists probably go through the same thing. My friend Shari sold her first painting at age 19 and in her exact words it was her “absolute favorite painting” that she ever painted and she doesn’t have a picture of it.
There are two “lost paintings” that I wish I had photos of:
One was my first “real” painting as an art minor in college. A distant acquaintance of my husband’s family bought it in 1999 for a few hundred dollars. It is one of a pair of paintings I did…..the unsold half of the pair “Ephemeral” hangs in our house today. I don’t even think I signed the painting I sold.
The other painting is a reproduction of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” that I painted as a mural in our first house. It was almost 9 feet tall and 4 feet wide on a wall as you climbed the stairs to the 2nd floor. The finished mural had a gold dusting I did over it to make it shimmer just slightly. The photos to the left were taken of the mural in its beginning stages. Almost to the day I finished the mural the house next to my childhood home came up for sale and we jumped on it. The mural helped sell our townhouse but because I was finishing my MBA, starting a new job, packing a house, renovating a new house…..I never got a photo of the finished product. I’ve wondered many times if it is still there or if it has been painted over. I never signed it. No owner will ever know who painted it.
Update: My mother read this blog post today and says she is going to visit and knock on the door of my old townhouse when she is back in NC to ask if the mural is still there 🙂
I say write them a letter!