Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

The strange thing about failure is that you can work so hard to achieve it. I’ have painted and painted and painted, there has rarely been a time that I was not exhibiting my work, in a shop or a window. And yet I can honestly say that my career in painting has been remarkable in its lack of affect.

And then, I’ am doing it all wrong, and I know myself to be doing it all wrong. I do small paintings. I know that it is large paintings that capture people”””’s attention and I know that it is large paintings that you see in galleries and on the walls of homes. But I on’ly do small paintings. Partly I only do small paintings because I don’t know what I would do with a stack of big paintings, when they failed to sell just as my small paintings do. (Please forgive my lack of single apostrophes, this font doesn’t seem to have any) But, you know, you can’t make great big paintings without practice, and so it seems that at some point it is necessary to accumulate a stack of unsellable large paintings. That’s just the way things are.

I put my paintings in the window of the empty shop downtown and a number of people, after six months of silence, commented on them. That was good. They didn’t buy them, though. Since I have the impression that buying is the inevitable path one must take to critical success, I find that a little sad. I don’t really know what I need to do to make a change to this static situation.

I’ve put some on ebay, in my ebay store. This is because I have heard people say: you wouldn’t believe what people buy. I would like to believe what people buy, I would like them to buy my paintings. Nothing has happened yet, I suppose it may not ever happen.

Perhaps all this desire to have my paintings sell is simply good for one thing: keeping me painting. It fulfils some need for creative occupation, it satisfies my eye, it smells good, doesn’t cost so much money. So why not.

A thing that disturbs me is to look back at earlier paintings and see how much better done they are. Much more care for edging and lines and attention to (more) realistic renderings. Actually I can’t seem to be capable of going back to those paintings. Lines become faster and looser and rougher, a dog is barely a dog. Fascinating, disturbing and curious. I do love to look at my paintings, close up, at the paint textures and the pencil lines.

I saw these screens, in the discount shop. Room screens that fold into three, made of canvas. So you can paint a painting onto them. They are fantastic. But where would I put them, for years and years, until it was time to toss them into the pile for the second hand shop?  Its very wasteful to fill unnecessary space.

Here. This one is called “India”, for no reason except the page I was turning at the time.