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I was so disappointed with my last in-progress painting question in early December that I haven't even visited the site since.
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Joan,
That's unfortunate, and I went back through the Critiques posts to see what might have been missed, but there was nothing there from you. I'm assuming that you're referring to the glazing question posted in the Techniques area in early December.
I'm sure it was frustrating not to get a lot of helpful feedback, but a number of possible explanations present themselves, including 1) the fact that very few of the practitioners here appear to use the underpainting/glazing method, so most members who read your post likely felt they had nothing to offer; 2) the few who do work by this method have written of it pretty extensively elsewhere (I'm thinking particularly of threads that Karin Wells has contributed to); 3) I have to imagine that it's an extremely difficult technique to explain verbally -- this is one where a good video, if not a workshop, trumps pages of written effort; and 4) as you said, this was in the build-up to the holidays, and I know I was overwhelmed at the time and I suspect many other members were as well (my recollection is that things were pretty slow in here during that time.)
Anyway, as to that painting, this is moot, but the request I'd like to make is that members assess the Forum over time and as a whole, and not on the basis of one or two posts or incidents. There's really no on-site, on-call "faculty," per se -- the fact that moderators may post as or more often than "average" is more by default or just personal availability or interest than it is a part of the job description. So there are just going to be times when satisfactory responses don't seem to be forthcoming. It's not personal. If it happens to me in a search -- and it has, just this past week, as I
begged the gurus on a computer troubleshooting forum to help me out, to little avail -- then I try the next resource on the list.
I'm sure we'll have a look at some of the stylistic matters mentioned (though the intentions were good -- for example, a paragraph that runs to several column inches is far less accessible to readers than one broken into smaller passages.) There's not much we can do if no one who
has an answer to a question doesn't also happen to be on the Forum and reading the question at the time.
So again, please consider this effort as a whole in assessing its value. Believe me, if unpleasant or disappointing events were each taken as deal-breakers, I'd have been out of here a long, long time ago. Learning that some members have felt excluded, chastised or just frustrated by certain incidents is nonetheless instructive and I'm glad it's come out in the open so that we have a chance to address it, as it's doubly disappointing to have remained uninformed until now of the reasons for the infrequency of some valued members' visits.
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