This tall painting has been hanging around since June 2014...that's what initial progress photos of it I took say. I guess I just wasn't sure how to finish it up. Based on some of the unique buildings in Paris, the initial idea was to let things happen in a casual way. I wanted to do a painting more about colour and texture and less about detail. Sort of abstract, sort of not.

I chipped away at it over many sessions, using a palette knife to apply paint and scratch back into it. Only towards the end did I do any work with a brush. I find it difficult to experiment and get unique textural results in large areas of flat colour, so that was the challenge. I think it took me so long to finish since it was more about the process than anything else. Throughout the work I had to continue to remind myself not to focus on details. Overall, there are some good zones I find interesting to look at, and a few that really bug me, where I probably fixated too much on what my actual photo looked like.