"never paint it again"

Good advice is basically the driving force of a current set of drawings and paintings I'm working on.  An awesome professor once advised the class "figure out what you don't want to paint and never paint it again."  I am taking this advice very seriously, maybe this is already what most artists do.  But to me, a lot of art seems to be composed of what the artist thinks is expected.  What should the ethereal or sexy lady archetype be doing in the painting, for example?  Well of course her hair should be blowing or something of that nature and she should have bedroom eyes, right? Well, if the form of a different type of hair or eye is more interesting to paint, just in terms of process, then thats what I'll paint.   Typing this out makes this seem painfully obvious and almost irrelevant, but I think if an artist will look at their past work they can easily pull out a few decisions that seem contrived by the artists idea of what the viewer wants to see.

So this current set of work I've started, began with this:

and a painting of the same image:

This type of image is similar to what I typically render.  Abstracted figures and faces are recurring themes in my work.  But this time I looked at this image with a question.  What did I like about the process of painting this image?  The answer is face, hair and hands.  You can tell looking at the body that there was no effort there to provide detail or indicate gender.  So I thought then it was pointless to depict a body at all, so what if I combined hands and heads only?   

And the next:

Eliminating the body allowed for a more interesting composition and more enjoyable painting session.  The next paintings in this series will continue this theme with a little more emphasis on the space behind the strange non-figurative figures.  

So this all boils down to editing out what doesn't interest you, free up some mental space, process your process.