its hard working in the shadows...

I have a show coming up in December - a little more than a week away so I am trying to get as many pieces done as possible while still making them look good. This piece is giving me all sorts of trouble. Trying to bring out color and shape in shadows is proving to be veeerrry difficult. When the focus of the piece is in the shadow there's no cheating away the form and color. Its quite a challenge. Needless to say I'm not exactly satisfied with the results yet. I'm in that frustrating stage of just pushing paint around hoping the right image and color will magically appear. Funny how it never works out that way.
The show in December is at Bauhaus. They have big bookshelves there that the paintings usually hang in front of. I think it looks awkward and distracts from the work terribly so hopefully I'll be able to come up with a solution. They get a lot of good foot traffic there so its worth trying to make it look as good as possible.
I'm starting to get pretty sick of this series so I'll be very happy when I can get back to my drawing and painting excersizes and start thinking about a new project. I don't want to creatively give up on this series though before I've given it a chance to be worked through as well as I can do it. The end is always the hardest for me. The newness of the work I'm doing has worn off so its hard to infuse the paintings with a sense of life and excitement when I'm personally bored with the project. But I think thats part of being a real painter - is being able to harness creative energy thoughtfully and not be crippled without "inspiration". The balance of the love of creating vs. the work of the craft.