"Reaching," an experiment

I'm doing a series of experiments testing several things. (I know, when you test you're only supposed to change one factor, but hey.) I'm painting on gessoed, unstretched canvas that's been taped to a board, and I'm leaving the background rough. Afterwards, I get to experiment with cropping. So, pre-crop, here's my full painting:


Here it's cropped in portrait mode:


And here it's cropped square. I think I like portrait better, but the more I look at this, the more I like it:


I'm especially fond of how the vase, with only a few brush strokes, says all it needs to. Maybe we need to fool ourselves into painting loosely, as with my experiments on cardboard early this year. If we're not as vested, because of cost or it's not the main part of the piece, maybe we paint looser.

Comments are welcome at conniekleinjans.blogspot.com.