This is post is part of what seems to be spring cleaning on this blog - an admittedly incongruous metaphor for a post about a winter moonlight! A few posts back I posted an image of this painting in a half-finished state with no comment along with an image of the half-finished "Maenads" which were also on the easel at the time. Aware that legions of people have gone to bed each night ever since asking themselves the question "What became of that painting???" I thought I had better finish the story.

The story of the moonlight is that it used to be a winter sunset. I did the sunset some years ago. It was an okay painting, I liked it, but it didn't sell and after making the rounds of my galleries it eventually came home to roost on my walls. I should explain that I have an uncomfortable relationship with my own paintings: I love them, but I'm critical of them. Fortunately, most of my paintings are sold, or at least away at a gallery, so I actually have very little of my own work around. What is here is mostly very old work from the period after my student days (I didn't sell a lot then) The best of the oldies get saved to remind me of my youth and to give me all sorts of ego-supporting feelings such as "wow, how talented and sensitive I was, but just think how much better I am today" The ones that fail to deliver that message get stashed in a closet and eventually scraped down so the canvas can be reused (that stuff costs money) And then there are the in-betweens, paintings that aren't that old but have somehow failed to sell. These are good enough to hang on the wall, but once they are there they irritate me: I look at them and see how much better they could be until inevitably I repaint them. Which is all by way of saying that one day I looked at the winter landscape and said - "that would be so much better as a moonlight".

So what I have here is the original winter sunset, an in-between state as I started to repaint it and the finished painting as it is today "Winter Moonlight"