Your painting journey so far is looking fantastic. I think you have a really great eye for composition and spacing and your color arrangement looks great too. You already have one of the most important qualities about being a great painter and that is practice. Keep going and you will only see yourself getting better. I sure wish I had stuck with it, so take my praise with a grain of salt. Two things I think you should consider trying.

1. Painting plein air. Moving outside to capture your subject first hand produces very interesting results. Not only will it lean you more to your own form of depiction, but Capturing natural light brings that light to the canvas. When you bring it inside you will be amazed at the vibrancy and fullness the painting has. And it is a great way to train your eye and use speed.
2. Paint large abstracts. Use a lot of paint ( or not). Abstraction benefits from size relative to us. The abstract expressionists really employed this technique to full effect, but the larger scale makes us relate to the image differently. Working on a bigger canvas can be super intimidating at first, for me at least, but filling up a large area is very rewarding, or at least revealing, or exploratory, lots of different things I suppose.

Just some food for thought, but your paintings look great so far. I might even be tempted to purchase one of these from you in the future. Keep it up friend, it looks like you are going in the right direction:)

I feel like the only thing the freedom caucus is actually achieving is tanking Americans credit rating by holding America’s budget hostage. Is there more than that? What is actually a long term goal they are hoping to achieve, or is this just another " we are not going to let the left get away with this" moment. Such a fucking joke.