Project Paint: Broken Down

Good day my friends! Hope your winter is going well, now that it's kinda acting like winter.

Now that I have all the photos of my art on Facebook, I thought I would take a minute now that I have some downtime after all my downtime and talk about them! As all artists know, there is a story behind absolutely everything, and in the event that some of you actual care about the artistic process behind my work, here is a sneak peek. I will leave all the boring stuff to those who ask personally, and only share the neat stuff. Hope you enjoy! And if you don't, well.. meh. :)

First up on the list is my purple landscape. I didn't have painting during the second semester of my first year, so the majority of my interaction with painting was through my friend Ally. She does these amazing landscapes in oil, and primarily paints with her fingers. I love her work immensely and watched her carefully, in hopes of some day reproducing what she does, to an extent.

The minute I was able to start painting this past semester, I inhaled some inspiration, put some purple on my brush, and started dancing. It was just a practice round for our Expressive Landscape assignment, so the canvas is very small, but the outcome was outstanding. It encouraged the rest of my painting, proving to myself that yes! I can paint! Fancy that.

I used gel medium for the texture, Dioxazine Purple, and some gray colour I stumbled upon. And was very pleased with the results.

Following that we have a canvas of the same size, which I creatively call Blue Landscape. This one was a fluke; I believe I had started this intending it to be an under painting, but I never went back to it, and just accepted it was it is. Funnily enough, it is one of my favorites. The simplicity of it and the simple suggestion of a landscape, coastline, possibly a town or houses or mountains on the side, allow my imagination to play. I actually find myself relating it to my childhood Home Away From Home: Covenant Bay Bible Camp at Pigeon Lake, which I frequented often previous to grade 11. It's a comforting painting, and I think that's what I like most about it.

That, and that it's a fluke.

Next is what I like to call Acid Tree. I ingested some inspiration, and watched the colours fill the page. The strokes melted as I applied them, and I had an epiphany. Layers. Everything is about layers, and I am all about layers. I dig them! When it comes to paintings, I believe in seeing the depth beneath the colour. Come up close and look at the orange. Realize that there's bright blue under the orange. It completely takes you by surprise, and I love that. That's what painting is all about for me. I want you to be able to taste the colour and hear the colour, and I want you to experience my work up close. Come discover what I have hidden beneath the depths of the paint and the colour and the picture. What do you see? Is that what it is, or is it something your own mind projects onto the page?

This painting was done with a total of five colours: Alizarin Crimson, Indian Yellow Hue, Ultramarine Blue, Pthalo Blue, and white. My newly discovered, favorite pallette.

Following my Acid Tree, which is my Expressive Landscape assignment, comes the Three Style Boogie. For this particular assignment all students drew three pieces of paper from a hat, each one containing a particular style or era of art. We are then to combine all three of those themes into one painting. I drew Orientalism, Psychedelic, and Comic. And I think to myself: what the hell am I supposed to create from that combination? Through some googling I finally came to a theme, then an idea, then an outcome. Birds! The left panel takes advantage of my newly found pallette discovered above, also playing with texture. The middle panel uses the comic style, the one on the right uses psychedelic, and the overall theme are oriental birds. I had a lot of fun doing this one, and I have never done anything like it in the past, or since. It is probably one of my most successful pieces, so perhaps I should entertain the idea of doing another one. The only problem is, I'm not sure what it is, how I did it, or how to do it again...

#visualartproblems?

As most, if not all, artists will tell you, there is always that one failure. The Painting. The one that you made, are embarrassed about, and generally not too sure what to do with. That's this one for me. We had a Halloween assignment called The Dance with Death, which was left open ended. Interpret that however we want, he said. Well, I'm the type of person that doesn't like to create things if they don't have meaning behind them, so I thought long and hard about this. Being someone of faith, I have a slightly different take or idea on death than the common person, so I wanted to explore that a bit further. I wanted to come up with something profound and brilliant, to knock the socks off of everyone. Well, eventually I came up with the idea of Death of Religion. Pretty radical, right? We have a broken church on the foreground, leaning on a cross mostly covered in ivy. There were other pieces that I was going to include, but by the time I was done the sky, I just wanted to be done with it.

The sky turned out way more Rococo than I had wanted for this particular painting. At first I thought it was neat, but eventually I remembered that the theme was Dance with Death, and I started to feel insecure that it wasn't 'Deathy' enough for the assignment, and doubted the entire painting. I still finished it, but I wasn't particularly excited to show it.

It's only redeeming feature, in my opinion, is the sky. You have to see it in person, but it's incredible. I used all sorts of mediums on it to give it incredible texture. I also used iridescent paints for the first time, and a couple of the mediums I used were brand new to me. That was partly the whole point of this painting, and a common theme you will see in my next work: I wanted to experiment. I wanted to test all these new products, see how they worked, and how I liked them.

Apparently I had enough time spent with texture, which I used to be in love with, because my later pieces I used to medium whatsoever.

Fun Fact: If you look close, I have pieces of an NIV bible in the background, along with some sheet and singing music to church songs I used to sing. A couple people saw me ripping up a bible, and that started some truly interesting conversations. A couple particularly funny ones went something like this:

Them: "I take it you're not religious then?"

Me: "No, I am... But this is just a book. It's not anything particularly special. It's the message inside that matters. Not the physical thing."

Them: ".....I wish there were more people like you!"

Or

Them: "So you're not Christian?"

Me: "No, I am."

Them: "Are you allowed to do that? I don't think you're allowed to do that."

Me: "It's just a book. There's no 'higher power' or anything attached to the book."

Them: "Can I touch it? I won't explode?"

I think Bible Ripping would make an interesting social experiment.

These next two pieces, the Abstract Pond and Abstract Wheat, were done for the project Texture of Time. Another open ended assignment, as they all are, and another project that we were all like 'what are we supposed to do with that?'. While I was thinking about what to paint, I had made the decision to paint up a bunch of boards, do some quick splash paintings using pretty colours, and try to sell them, as I am in need of money. Again, as all artists are. So I did this one and the yellow one, just the backgrounds, by the time we were given the assignment. After a few days had gone by and I hadn't figured out what to do, I recalled a line from one of my dad's magic shows, that talks about a ripple through time. This image I always have of this pond that goes on til the end of time and space. So in a moment of inspiration, I grabbed the blue board I painted up, and suggested ripples. It took me about ten minutes, and I was done. And I was PLEASED. I couldn't believe a painting that took me maybe 30 minutes in total, background included, could be one of my favorites. So I did it again with the wheat one.

Just suggesting the plant, really not putting in a lot of time or detail, I got an image that I was super pleased with! I presented them for my assignment, and was okay about it.

The next assignment was a Series project. Choose a painting we have done previously, or choose an idea that we've wanted to do for a long time, and make a series of it. At least two more, expanding on the idea with the hopes that through this little experiment we will discover something. Through doing the same, or at least similar, thing over and over, new things will pop up. New ideas, new techniques, whatever it might be. So I continued on with the splash paintings. Partially because I still intended to sell them in the end, especially since they don't take long to do, and also because this was a painting technique I thoroughly enjoyed. It was quick, easy, and again- it was an experiment.

I call these my test tiles. The idea was that I'm only using three or four colours per painting, and sometimes they're colours I've never used before, or colours I've never used together. I then wrote the colours on the back, for record-keeping sake. The galaxies were fun to do because I got to suggest some spheres, which was something we worked on first half of first semester first year. By just implying an outline, usually with my finger, I got really satisfying planet shapes. The technique of splash painting also really helped with the feeling of space, nebulas, things like that.

Splash painting is essentially, as implied by the name, super saturated paints that are splattered onto the board. How I did it was drip big gobs of paint on the surface, waited for them to set a little bit, then used my water container I use for cleaning my brushes, and dump that on the surface, little bits at a time. It's fun, easy, and quick. Then I get some thicker paint of the same colour and paint the image. I don't go into the piece knowing what it's going to look like. Something I discovered about my painting technique is I work with Happy Accidents, and I like to let the painting tell me what it's going to be. Like Michelangelo (wow, now don't I sound pretentious), the picture was always in the board, I just allowed it to come to the surface.

This painting is the best example of that last idea. I literally turned it in all directions before coming to this angle. The big tree part was darker than the rest of the background, and I literally said "Oh! Of course! It's a tree!" and off I went. I knew exactly what to paint and how to paint it, because I already saw it in the background. One would almost call it cheating, if there were any real rules written down on how to paint. But alas and alack there are not, so I can do whatever the hell I want. And if I want to come up with a new genre of painting, abstract romanticism or what have you, then so be it. I love it and I was proud of every single one of these paintings. That is not something I can say about most of my art work.

Thank you for humouring me, and know that if ever you have any questions, ideas, whatever, or just want to chat, my ears are at the ready. Take care, drive safe, and Happy New Year!