New thinking about painting
Although I am now halfway through this painting year I have decided to make a complete change of approach to my work and have been tentatively working in a more abstract way to generate paintings that don’t explicitly describe a given image.
Early results seem to be gradually achieving some success in my eyes and hopefully, this mode of working will be the way forward from now onwards. I have been inspired by others who work exclusively in this activity and noted several ways in which these artists reduce the essentials to patterns and colours and textures.
Although I feel that have been fairly bold in my mark-making and colour choice in recent paintings, I do tend to ‘tidy up’ these marks and use fairly tight colour applications. A newer approach will need changes to allow looser working and more complex methods of colour application which will allow far greater scope for expression.
With this change of technique, there needs to be a different way of seeing the subject and exploring the essentials in a picture composition. To meet this challenge I rough out a line composition of a chosen subject with the major elements in place from whatever original I am working with. Then not referencing back to the original in any way I move, enlarge, or delete these elements until I am satisfied that the resulting composition still reflects the subject but contains only the essential information.
I have published a few early pictures on the web and on Instagram but will add more to the menus when I am happy with future results.
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