Date at Beacon Hill Park

After a bit of a hiatus from painting, I finished a canvas this very morning. It felt amazing! I've been all kinds of excuses for myself as to why it'd been a few months since picking up my brush(es). It's not been a lack of inspiration - I'm more inspired now than I have been in a while. It's more that the inspiration has manifested itself in other forms.

I started this piece back in the spring - an image inspired by a springtime visit to Victoria with Cam to visit family. I got to a certain point of completion on the painting and then stopped. I'm ashamed to say that this painting that depicts a springtime scene was left sitting incomplete on my easel all summer. It took until today (days before the end of summer) to reach completion, despite the canvas staring me in the face every single day as if to say, "Zahida, why don't you take a seat and FINISH ME ALREADY." One of the things preventing me from achieving completion was that I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was 'wrong' with my painting. That is, I didn't know exactly what I needed to do to change the image from what it was (incomplete) to something complete that I could be proud of. I analyzed it over and over again. Let's just say that I figured it out and finally finished. In fact, I am so pleased with it, I have already framed it and given it a home on a wall in our bedroom and it looks perfect there.

Beacon Hill Park is a beautiful city park in Victoria, BC. Victoria is a great city - our provincial capital, and the city where Cam grew up. Cam and I have taken a few lovely strolls together in the park, and I'll be running a couple of loops there in my upcoming half marathon race too. I'd say it's one of my favourite places to visit in Victoria, located right in the heart of the city, between the Legislature and Cook Street Village. I decided on the title of this piece, Date at Beacon Hill Park, because of my lovely walks in the park with Cam, but also because of the two mallard ducks in this painting. I have been playfully suggesting to Cam that the ducks in the painting are really he and I, enjoying the park - me quacking at him from behind, "hey wait up!"

Here's 3 steps of this piece's process, followed by the final product:














Date at Beacon Hill Park
Acrylic on Canvas
16 x 20