Eakins Felt it Too!

"Everything is in a muddle…Even the commonest colors seem to have the devil in them.  You see a thing more yellow, you put yellow in it, and it becomes only more gray when you tune it up.  As you get on you get some difficulties out of the way, and what seems trying is that some of the things that gave you the greatest trouble were the easiest of all."

Thomas Eakins

It's interesting to be reading a book on Eakins and to come across this quote just at about the same time when I'm experiencing some issues with a landscape I'm working on. He nailed the way I feel, at least the first part of the quote which mentions the colors having the "devil in them". That's my opinion on the greens I've been working with, and just when I think I'm making some progress I come to realize later that nothing is working. Everything seems to be working against me, the bad lighting in the studio, the bright greens I'm mixing and can't tone down, the texture of the linen, who knows it even seems like my brushes are conspiring against me! All painting is problem solving, but before you are able to resolve a problem you have to first identify it, which I think I'm having a hard time with. I'm not sure what's going wrong in the studio, I even reconfigured the layout of it hoping it would help me reach that point of enlightenment when everything starts to click, but it hasn't done much. What do you do when you reach a point where everything you try does not seem to work?  Eakins says "As you get on you get some difficulties out of the way", well I am getting on and the difficulties are still there. I do hope I will get them "out of the way" soon because I am running out of options and I failure is not part of my nature.  With this post out of the way, it's time to put my head down and keep getting on.