This was last week's painting slathered with gum arabic which allowed me to put down and take off paint with abandon, and it was a helluva lot of fun, every brush stroke led to another possibility, and when I was done I was thinking isn't this great?
The next morning I wasn't so sure. It still has a lot of movement, and interesting colors and a structure, and some nice highlights, but putting them all together, I don't know, I think there should be more. Maybe if I kept doing those nonrepresentational things I could discover things that would make more, well, something. Or maybe I should go back to representative stuff, though you know how I hate the tyranny of the image, maybe it's something I should just learn to live with.
Your colors are so vibrant and rich. I suspect that may be the gum arabic, but I really like it. So, my view on nonrepresentational art--what needs to be there to make it successful? I love your colors and textures, for instance, but does there need to be some (intended) deep meaning? And does it have to feel the same for everyone? I suspect not, because how much deep meaning is there in a bowl of fruit? And not everyone is touched the same way by every piece of art. Hmm....I look forward to one of our group Saturday morning discussions.
ReplyDeleteI’m a pretty literal person, so I’m always looking for the representational even if I know it’s not there. So when I don’t find anything, I look for movement before noticing color or texture, because maybe movement represents energy to me. So the movement here leads to the top right corner but then nothing happens there. The energy to me seems to be at the bottom right, that dark blue green mass, so the painting seems unresolved to me. But honestly, I have no idea how you would even paint a non representational image. What do you start with?
ReplyDeleteI am not saying this is the correct way to do art or anything like that, just the way I look at it. When you look at say that garden view with the fishes and think I like that, okay maybe you are thinking this is my garden and I love it and I want to express that love by doing a painting of it. But you don't just choose any view, you look for a particular one where the shapes and the colors are a pleasing pattern which can only be determined by a black box in your subconscious (ok, that's a little weird) which proclaims that this is good. So what you are really painting is the shapes and colors.
DeleteSo why not do away with what the image is about and just concentrate on the shapes and colors, and freed from the tyranny of the image you can paint in a purer atmosphere. Wouldn't that be better?
See that is what I am thinking, but looking at my painting all the pieces seem to work for me, but not the whole thing. It is lacking that whole being bigger than its parts.
So maybe I need a union between something real and shapes and colors. So that is what I am trying now. July 26, 2022, 9:32 am ctd.