I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
I’m looking forward to submitting artworks to the Heritage Fine Arts Guild This is Colorado show. Submissions open July 28th, and the show runs September 3rd to September 25th at the Colorado Gallery of the Arts at Arapahoe Community College.
I’m having a hard time deciding what to submit, however. I do have plenty of old artworks I could submit, but which ones to choose? And ideally, I’d love to use this as an opportunity to create some new art.
Lately, my art has felt stilted and stunted to me. Last year around this time, I started a series of paintings using a repetitive set of steps that resulted in my Snow Bound set of paintings and photography pairings. I felt a lot of artistic energy and possibility during the creation of those paintings.
I’ve been using glaze more often lately, as in the painting shown here, tentatively titled I’m Going to Blow Up. I’m thinking of creating a series based on elements from this painting:
- Saturated blocks of glazed color like the reds as structural elements
- Light or pale areas like the top third to add breathing space
- An implied architecture of walls, rooms, or enclosures, putting the viewer into an emotional space
- Use of erratic, energetic lines and marks
- Texture and transparency suggesting erosion and history
- Unusual color combinations such as the mix here: the mauve, blue, and sea green under the red and ochre yellow to me are surprising. I love it when surprising colors peek through upper layers of a painting.
Here are the repetitive set of steps I’ll follow to make each painting:
- Start with my typical black+burnt umber priming of the canvas—this gives a depth to the final piece and that sense of erosion when the dark color appears underneath the lighter and brighter colors.
- Add large areas of off-white neutrals, in blocks. I usually make these with a mix of titanium white, diarylide yellow, and ivory black. This can give olive green, alabaster, or greige depending on proportions.
- Add small blocks of desaturated light value opaque color (like the sea green, cadet blue, and mauve in the painting above), filling in around the large shapes already established.
- Choose a secondary main color like the yellow ochre and make energetic marks over part of the painting
- Add glazed blocks of a primary saturated color to define an architectural structure of sorts on the painting
- Finally add a china marker or crayon scribble
I might use this for the paintings I’m creating as part of my memoir/essay project Things Men Gave Me. I’m taking some chapters of a memoir I already wrote and turning them into personal essays. Each of those essays is about a gift that a man gave me, but what they are really about underneath that is the emotional lessons I learned as the story surrounding the gift unfolded. Each essay will be paired with an abstract painting. I was toying with having the paintings be abstracted representations of the gifts, but I like the idea of instead representing something more intangible.
I could title the painting shared here This Painting Isn’t About You, in order to match it with the essay I have in progress about a man I dated who wanted to share in the meanings of my paintings when I wasn’t ready for that.
I feel excited to get started on a new painting in this series today! I will probably set aside some other paintings I have in the works, or even paint over them, to move past the stagnation I’ve felt in my art lately.