Time Well Tasted

 

Time Well Tasted

14” x 13”

Acrylic Paint of Hardboard

Decemeber 2009

London, Ontario

Jim Kogelheide

 

The last few months of 2009 were very busy around my home.  September and October saw Joanne and me spending most of our time looking at many houses throughout London.  We finally found one and then we spent the next month or so moving and setting up our lives.  Once we were settled, I began working on a large wall mural in our living room…

A week or so later, I got a phone call from someone who saw my advertisement for pet portraits.  Joanne was working at a veterinarian clinic and her boss let me put a small flier up in the reception area.  I accepted the commission and he sent in a few photos of his dog.  This is the one that I ended up using…

The dog’s name was Digger and he had passed away in the spring of that year.  The owner wanted a portrait of his dog to hang on his wall so that he could always remember the joy Digger had brought into his life.  The challenge was… the owner wanted it before Christmas!  I had to get very busy!!

I scanned the photograph into my computer and I used a graphics program to place filters on the image until I had an image that could easily be traced!  I say easily… but look at this image!!! LOL!  Tracing the image onto the painting board was not easy at all… it took several hours!

The graphics program also helped me to break down the colour scheme that I would use in this painting.  It’s interesting that the colour black was never used in the creation of this Black Lab!  His face was painted using three shades of green, four shades of red/brown, two shades of gold, three shades of red and three shades of purple!!!

To make the whole painting unite and come together, some areas of the beach and stick were painted using the same colours that are in Digger!  This is a technique that I had learned to use over the years.  While my desire is to make sure that each element of the painting is clearly distinct from each other, using a few of the same colours in each element helps to unite the painting as a whole.

When I started to paint the gravel beach in the background, I found myself really attracted to the random shapes and blobs that represented the gravel!  I took this inspiration and used in the wall mural that I was also painting during this time…

This is one of the reasons why I so enjoy being an artist!  I love how one process for creating textures can inspire new processes for creating textures.  If I had not been painting Digger’s portrait and been inspired by the texture of the gravel beach, would the inside texture of my mural be as it is??

It was quite the push to get Digger’s portrait done before Christmas… and I was successful!  It was completed at 2:34pm on December 22!  This left me with two days to make arrangements with the person who commissioned me, to meet up so I could give him the painting.

Later that evening, Joanne was watching TV and I was in the next room just looking at this painting and enjoying it.  My last task was to give it a name.  Since Digger had passed away, I wanted to stay away from calling it something like ‘Digger Will Be Missed’ or any other title that brought more of a focus on his death instead of a focus on the energy of his life. 

A commercial for the Comedy Network came to my ears from the other room, with their catch phrase ‘Time well wasted’!  As I looked at this painting, I said, “Well, Digger… it sure looks to me like your stick is well tasted!”  This was the spark that inspired me to title this painting Time Well Tasted!  Again… another example of how the life that surrounds us can inspire us in interesting ways!

I met up with the person who commissioned this portrait, the very next day!  He absolutely adored it!  He was going to be having some family over during the upcoming holidays, and he was very excited to be able to show this portrait to his friends and family!!!

This commission dates back just over thirteen years, and it brings a smile to my face thinking that it is still bringing joy into a few lives!

Jim Kogelheide

January 16, 2022