I am desperately feeling the need to start a couple of new fresh pieces of work. I had mentioned in previous post that I had a sketchy drawing of a piece with three figures. One of my goals for this year was to start several pieces where a. the figures are overlapping, and b. there are more than two figures on the canvas (3 or 5 would be best). With the piece that I have posted I attempted to do both of those things.
However, I felt my attempt at getting out of the box, at least with this particular piece was flimsy. This was confirmed by Nicole who noted that the piece didn't describe visually what "Duality" (the series) was. Dallas felt the figure at the top was awkward, and design friend Jen (who is in Philadelphia) remarked that the figures didn't really seem to relate to each other. Essentially all of my doubts about the piece were confirmed. It was time to go back to the drawing board...literally!
I started our session however, with doing something mindless without having to think too much about the complexities of mixing concept with form and how I would change my painting/drawing. I worked on the background of my commission portrait. I decided that I would cover the background in a yellowish, greenish, greyish color. I used raw umber, olive green, black, and yellow ochre. Painting the background surprisingly ate up a huge chunk of time. Nicole liked the final result, and initially I thought that this layer would be just an initial start for more of a glazed background, however, now I feel it could possibly be the background. If that is the case, that would be fantastic and I wouldn't have to paint David amidst a landscape of pine trees much like the work of Bob Ross. Again, I need to contact the client for their thoughts. This time I mean it, as I haven't done that quite yet.
After my background was finished I made everyone talk to me about my concept and piece with three figures. Lots of great things were mentioned and Dallas asked me: "Wasn't one of the meanings of 'Duality' a play on the twin sisters of art- form and content?" No, that wasn't anywhere in my artists statement, but now that you mention it, that is some fantastic art mumbo jumbo that needs to be in my artists statement. Dallas is like that: he doesn't say much, but there are certain moments when he spouts off something really profound, unexpected, and relevant.
As the end of our time was drawing near, I went through about a hundred 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of printed images of the twins that I have in sheet protectors. I was making an effort to find images for my next 'out of the box' paintings combining those elements I mentioned above. I try to file most of the images I have in binders, however, I have collected a huge stack of these sheets that are unorganized and not filed in their respective binders of "Madelaine" and "Erica". I separated the sheets into two stacks: one stack for images that I loved or that caught my eye in any way, the other for definate 'NO' photos. I hadn't gone through the images in quite a while, so they all brought back a bit of nostalgia. I looked at some photos that actually became paintings, and couldn't remember the actual painting until I thought about it for a while. It was interesting to look at little marks on my photos and have no idea what the marks meant. It was almost like looking through an old journal. Some deer in a wintry pine forest caught my eye. I wanted to include this in a background. Erica on a train made me want to do a modern piece with garish colors but I feared loosing the concept of the series if I created a narrative background.
In the end I felt desperate that I needed more weirdness in my paintings. As my friend Byron noted, "Should you wake up one day and want to paint one of the twins stabbing someone with a knife, then I think you should do that". In other words, don't be weird to be weird, however, if I should desire to paint weirdness that might work well.
An interesting option that Nicole mentioned was to actually photograph the girls upside down, which would change the facial features, expression, etc. I felt it was a fresh enough idea to get me excited and I started visualizing Erica hanging upside- down from my neighbors swing set....
No comments:
Post a Comment