doggie paintings

It's harder then I thought to fight off this internal voice that wants to justify whatever that I'm painting. I admitted to John couple days ago that it was David Hockney's paintings of his dogs that made me feel comfortable about painting my dog. There is always this thought that "a painting needs an idea! a painting should be more than formal concerns," because 99 percent of the articles about paintings are all talking about ideas so it must be wrong to paint without one. As specialized as a profession can be, within that social circle, there's still old ideas and old rules that people follow without knowing why.