Flight of the Bumble Bee

Well I'm all done! Yeah! I started this blog for experimenting and doing this demo certainly has been a new experience for me. I so appreciate every one's comments and encouragement which made this demo super fun for me. I set about this painting with a couple of objectives in mind. One was to challenge the 'norm' of thin background. My background here, (or dandy lion field) is very thick and broken, the sheer fabric is painted thin and with less brushwork except in the lace and black dots which are very thick. The challenge being making the thin come forward and the thicker recede. To add to this challenge, the color I wanted to pull forward was black against the light warm background. Yikes! During this process I had to ask myself, why do we have to create this receding background??? The more I paint, the more I seem to find a desire to incorporate an abstract influence into my paintings or at least in my thought processes. Why can't the 'background' be just as important as the 'subject matter'? In abstract painting every part of the canvas is 'active' (if that is the right choice of words). I know we need restful spots on the canvas, that everything can't be equally important, but with representational art can our objects be so recognizable that our eyes are naturally drawn there and other areas of the painting be more than just background? Anybody??? Am I crazy today or what?