One of the nice things about blogging is that it enables me to slow down and just show my art and talk about it a little bit, rather than constantly battle the algorithms of various social media platforms to get noticed. Today, I thought I talk about the failed painting that led up to what I consider to be a breakthrough painting in my new Cookie Landscape series, “The Daydreamer.”
Please be aware that this post will be just a bit personal and a bit sad. If you’d like to skip it and stick with the happier posts, I completely understand. I’m just trying to share the very human side of what went into these paintings, because under it all, I think that is makes art important: the human part.
This is “The Daydreamer,” acrylic on panel, 24″ x 24″ (not the failed painting). At first glance, it might look simple, even cartoonish, but upon closer inspection, I hope you’ll be able to see the sophistication of the painting methodology and the design, and feel a little bit of the magic that I hope shines through. I’m going to share some close-up images of this in my next post later this week. You can also view a few of them in this post, Three Reasons I Wish You Could See My New Paintings In Person and Not Online.
Since I began sharing “The Daydreamer” on social media last September, particularly on TikTok, it has received hundreds of thousands of views and hundreds and hundreds of comments. There is something about it that connected with people, and I love that. That’s my job: making happy art that connects with people. But this piece just didn’t spring up out of nowhere. There were a lot of roots that went into it.
Let’s talk about the failed painting that led up to this one. Maybe failed is a harsh term. Perhaps I should call it a pre-cursor, but I’m sticking with “failed” because it had a lot of issues that taught me a number of lessons.
The Failed Painting
This is “Daydreamer Believer,” (yes, like the Monkees’ song; I loved those re-runs as a kid), unfinished, acrylic on panel, 20″ x 16″. I’ll be keeping this one, and I’m not sure if I will ever go back to finish it.
I started this painting in May of 2025, along with a couple of others. As with all of my cookie landscapes, I baked and decorated a real-life cookie model before starting. I had just finished two of my Cookie Landscape paintings, and my gallery had offered me a show (coming up soon, March 2026).
I have an assortment of cookie cutters, many of them as old as I am; in some cases, I just hand-cut my cookie shapes with a butterknife. In this case, however, I used this horse cookie cutter from my childhood.
If you know anything about baking cookies, you might notice that this cookie cutter doesn’t look like it would “work” right, and to be honest, it never did. Throughout my childhood, baking with my mom and my sister, we tried and tried at various times, but the cutter just wasn’t deep enough to cut through the cookie dough. But since I only needed one cookie (or two, so I had a backup), I pushed it down and then just cut it out the rest of the way with a butterknife.
Since I began this cookie series, I have learned that it is sometimes better to use shortbread dough rather than sugar cookie dough because it doesn’t spread as much. However, I hadn’t considered that at this point yet, so the sugar cookie horse spread a bit, and I had to trim it down with the butterknife while it was still warm to get something closer to the shape I wanted.
Now I had blank, undecorated horse cookie. I just didn’t know what to do with it yet.
I have this photo of me and my younger sister viewing a horse at a farm not far from where we grew up in rural Pennsylvania. I always loved how curious my sister looked in the photo, stepping forward, timidly, to see how close she could get to the horse. I remember empathizing with the horse and wondering if he was happy where he was, fenced in, waiting for people to come by and stare at him.
I hadn’t yet decided on a color for my horse, but I had a little brown cat, 17 years old, who sat with me everyday for painting. After look at many photos, including the one of me and my sister, and drawing inspiration from my painting buddy, I arrived at brown.
I knew I wanted a field of flowers and maybe a fence. I baked and decorated a bunch of cookies and just started arranging. Eventually, I came up with the first design. I was happy with it, sort of. I worked on it and worked on it and then…
…sadly, my painting buddy passed away, and I stopped the painting. I stopped all painting, for a few weeks, actually. I was pretty devastated. Still am.
A Fresh Start
When I was finally able to pick myself up enough to begin working again, I decided to keep “Daydream Believer” and start a new “horse” painting from scratch. “Daydream Believer” holds a lot of memories for me, and it taught me a lot of lessons about painting the cookie subjects: the parts that I struggle with, the importance of the colors, the drama of the piece. Keeping a painting I’ve spent many hours on is something I rarely do, as I make my living by selling my paintings, but sometimes, it is a necessary part of growth as an artist.
I took the original horse cookie, some of the flowers and the fence from the model I’d made for “Daydream Believer,” and began a new design. What had I liked and disliked about the other piece? Truth be told, most of what I didn’t like in the other piece was the colors: too muted, too bland, not enough drama. I also didn’t like the sun. I thought the shape implied too much overbearing heat in the piece and the color looked like macaroni and cheese. I decided to nix the sun in the next piece.
I am generally a pretty abstract thinker. With the cookies, I will often look at other cookies I’ve baked as extras to see what I can do with them, instead of planning every detail out and baking in accordance. I looked at what I had: a bunch of leftover butterfly cookies, not decorated, from another painting I was simultaneously working on. I wondered, if I broke the wings off of those cookies, could they be clouds? Sure enough, those shapes ended up quite lovely!
I focused on color. I focused on shapes and balance. I made the piece bigger (the new one is 24″ x 24″, the original one is only 16″ x 20″). I wanted to make a statement. I added a nicer-looking monarch butterfly, a cookie from another painting, in part as a symbol of transformation, independence and freedom. I also decided to anchor the space a bit more with a big red gingerbread barn, like so many of the lovely red barns I remember from growing up near the countryside.
The New Painting
I spent more than 200 hours in all on “The Daydreamer,” honestly with very little idea of how it would be received. But I was driven. I felt purposeful. I felt like I had tapped into something in myself that finally made me feel like the artist I always wanted to be. So here is “The Daydreamer” again, along with a few links to some of my TikTok videos of it. I’ve kept all of the lessons I learned leading up to this in mind as I tacked my next pieces, and while I still have much to learn, I truly believe this is just the beginning.
Back to painting!
Kim T.
Leave a Reply