Two Berkeley Painters

This is a detail of a larger oil on canvas done on 9th and Camellia streets, in Berkeley. They are my colleagues and did not know I was painting them. I scraped these figures the very next day because they did not serve my larger purposes i.e. the whole canvas image. Later, I but used this photo of the original figures to create their replacement, which I will show soon. They were too small in comparison with the cars parked near them. I loved the rendering (so simple yet effective), but they had to go. The moral? Never fall in love, no matter how beautifully you have painted  something. Because if it does not "read" the way you intend, it will not matter. In this case, the size was a tad too small, small enough to distract the viewer, who then would ask themselves, "is this intentional, or a mistake?" And this is itself isn't bad, but if it takes over the entire process of viewing, then it is bad.