Wednesday, May 11, 2005
A Paintings Progress - Part 1
I am usually in some other state when I paint so I thought it would be interesting to try and record the progression of a painting. People ask me "how?", "why?", "what is it?", "what does it mean?", Most of the time I don't have an answer.
Here is Part 1 (lots of pictures):
What follows probably took an hour or so of actual painting time over a period of 24 hours. Photographing the painting and trying to get an appropriate setting took longer than the actual painting part.
1. I started with a very strong urge to paint. So I spent most of Saturday clearing space, finding paints and brushes and basically setting up.
2. Saturday evening I had a blank canvas and no idea what to paint. The not knowing what to paint wasn't a problem because I needed to paint. Anyway, I came up with the following. I did the red bits first. This first step took less than a minute, and it looks like it!
3. Then I added some blue dots. Don't know why. At this point I have decided that the red things are obviously two dandelions.
4...dithering about where the painting is going...
5. I am sick of dithering so I decide the painting needs something dark and dramatic in the bottom right corner.
As soon as I painted this I realised it was in the wrong place. It needed to be further to the right and maybe a bit lower.
6. So I play around some more trying to get the balance right. Usually I don't think these things. Usually it is a subconscious process. Maybe taking the photos made me more conscious of the process.
7. Current state. Now I really like the right hand side, and I am thinking maybe the "dandelions" belong in a different painting.
Here is Part 1 (lots of pictures):
What follows probably took an hour or so of actual painting time over a period of 24 hours. Photographing the painting and trying to get an appropriate setting took longer than the actual painting part.
1. I started with a very strong urge to paint. So I spent most of Saturday clearing space, finding paints and brushes and basically setting up.
2. Saturday evening I had a blank canvas and no idea what to paint. The not knowing what to paint wasn't a problem because I needed to paint. Anyway, I came up with the following. I did the red bits first. This first step took less than a minute, and it looks like it!
3. Then I added some blue dots. Don't know why. At this point I have decided that the red things are obviously two dandelions.
4...dithering about where the painting is going...
5. I am sick of dithering so I decide the painting needs something dark and dramatic in the bottom right corner.
As soon as I painted this I realised it was in the wrong place. It needed to be further to the right and maybe a bit lower.
6. So I play around some more trying to get the balance right. Usually I don't think these things. Usually it is a subconscious process. Maybe taking the photos made me more conscious of the process.
7. Current state. Now I really like the right hand side, and I am thinking maybe the "dandelions" belong in a different painting.
// posted by suze @ 10:26 PM 
