Finding the painting inside the painting.....

 I started painting in 2001.  Over the years, even though I haven't always painted consistently, I have accumulated quite a number of paintings.  They are stacked in a drawer and on a shelf in the basement.  For the Northminster Fine Arts Show, I decided to see if I could clear some of my shelf space and salvage some of my older paintings.  A lot of them are what I would call watercolor sizes.  A full sheet of watercolor is 22 x 30 inches, and watercolor artists frequently paint on a half or quarter sized sheet.  None of these sizes fit neatly with a standard gallery sized frame.  Custom frames are expensive, so I began to consider how I could crop my paintings.  I started to look for the bast painting within a painting.

I bought two sets of standard sized mats (8 x 10 inches with a 5 x 7 inch opening and 16 x 20 inches with a 10 x 14 inch opening) from clearbags.com and here are two results.

The original painting was about 15 x 22 inches (half sheet), and the cropped painting is 10 x 14 inches.  Painted c. 2006.  Sunflower Bouquet. Sold.

In the original, the background and "busy" space are evenly divided across a diagonal, which weakens the composition of the painting.  In the cropped painting, most of the background, surrounds emphasized the sunflower, which made it more the focal point of the painting. 

This original painting was done around 2004 and was about 11 x 14.  It was never finished.  The cropped painting is 5 x 7 inches. I think the center section makes a nice loose interpretation all by itself.  Glass Vases.