"Heartstrings" (12x16 oil on panel) painting process and thoughts

Greetings,
This is a painting that resolved itself (both conceptually and visually) during the course of its creation. It doesn't always happen this way, but when it does, I find it to be a most satisfying way to work.

detail

First stage:

Very loose start. How liberating.

Next stage:

More and more my painting process has become a journey of exploration. Searching, testing, trying to find the way. Notice I changed the shadow colors in the face to blue. You don't know until you try. That's the beauty of such a forgiving medium.

It started as wings...then something else came to me.

And the finished painting, "Heartstrings" (12x16 oil on panel, 2016):

Details:

"The accumulation of experience has increased my comfort with uncertainty. I'm now more able to enter a painting with only a vague and simple idea, with the faith and determination to flounder for a bit in the middle stages of the painting before coming out the other side. Before starting Heartstrings, I knew the basic layout and color scheme. I wasn't sure about the color in the face shadows, as demonstrated by the shift from warm to cool between process shots 3 and 4. There was an idea to add wings on the left side, but the empty space wasn't there for wings specifically, it was there for space. I wanted that feeling of forward motion (almost a falling motion) towards the right side. Through the act of painting I began to feel the emotional potential of the pose— somewhere between pain and passion—and so I abandoned the wings entirely and made heartstrings."