Social Media and Indecisive Art

Ah, it's time for another weekly installment of the art blog that does not have a readership.  It's actually kind of nice to think about this being out there in the public space of the internet but nobody reads it because there's just so much floating out there that people don't care.  It's a bit like going to the grocery store in ones sweatpants.  You're out in public but nobody really cares.  It's not as if I say anything that's deeply life changing on this blog anyway. If you're not me and you are actually wasting your time reading this right now, that's also fine with me.

Now that I'm done saying that - on to this week's art topic.

Now that I am thinking about how I use social media I am thinking about how there is this pressure to have something really cool to post and to consistently have something really cool to post.  Lately, I feel like my art is floundering around a bit.
I got started in November thinking about getting back into painting.  It had been so long since I had been consistently creating art that I was just happy I could still paint half way decently.
Then I started thinking about what I wanted to paint and how I wanted to paint it.  I felt like I really hit something when I painted "Carver Street Pine" so I wrote down the steps I took when I painted it. The idea was that I could recreate those steps and that could be my painting style.  So I created my next painting that way.
 At first I was happy with it.  Then I decided that idea of applying the same steps to all paintings wasn't working.  Something was missing.  I thought maybe it was the composition.  At that time I just happened to be teaching the rule of thirds (a type of composition) to my students.  Then I found an old booklet at school that I think it meant for high school aged students that talked a little about composition.
I really started thinking about how I am using light and dark areas and where I am putting things in the picture.  I feel very unpracticed in this area.  I think it's setting me back.
I started creating composition sketches and I made a few imaginary desert landscapes.  That seemed to start going in a direction that I wanted to but now that doesn't seem good enough either because working out of the imagination doesn't give me enough to work with although it has something.
Now I'm trying to tweak what I already see with what I am learning about composition.  So it's a combination of real and unreal.  I'm not sure what to make of it.
Here are the current results:

And here's a completely different direction to - hands - in part inspired by the recent drawings of hands by Tayen Kim and one other sketch artist who posts on Instagram.