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Hello Art Enthusiasts;

I've just completed my most recent painting, "Monarch Above The Timbers", which portrays an American Bison standing proudly on a high plateau above the forested mountains. This theme has been done by many well known artists over the last few decades and I've always admired the skill and effort that it took them to achieve the realism and idealism in their art. So, I had to try it myself. While many contemporary western wildlife and landscape representational artists paint on much smaller canvases with great success, I've really stretched myself on this painting (pardon the pun :-)) which is 36 x 78 inches in size. Basically it as large as a door opening and it took me many months to paint it out to the point that I couldn't find anything else to edit or repaint. While I think my painting skill level has improved over the last couple of years, I'm not sure what I was thinking by boldly attempting to paint on such a large canvas in the first place. I laid out about $800 dollars in materials and I constructed the canvas frame and stretched a medium coarse linen over it. Once completed, I stood there briefly in front of the large blank canvas not wanting to mess it up with a bad attempt at painting, yet I was also eager to see what I could accomplish by moving boldly forward. I mean, it's only paint, right? What's the worst that could happen? I might paint it horribly to my own chagrin and spend lots of time doing so, creating the need to at some point paint over it with another idea or maybe even have to remove a ruined canvas and restretch another one over the same frame. But, the time an artist actually invests in a painting is another factor to be considered. Yes, I've got several failed paintings stacked around all over my studio, but I prefer not to make that practice a habit. I took a risk and now it is a finished painting. I'm satisfied with the result. In fact, I've very pleased with it. At least I exceeded my own expectations. Let me know what you think? An artist really gets a kick out of enthusiastic commentary on their works. Yet, we really need constructive feedback too in order to continue to improve our work.

I've entered this painting into the Boldbrush Art Contest. If you find that you like my painting, please visit this link and give me a vote. It won't decide the contest winner but it will give me some visibility to other art enthusiasts, etc.

#Vote for R.B. Christian in the Bold Brush Art Contest#

Best Regards!