Studio Time

I didn’t get a chance to work on “On the Street” yesterday. Things were a little busy. I did get a bit of work done on this painting.

This is an attempt to push the automatic drawing idea, that I typically use, a bit sideways. Normally, what I call a scribble works as a sort of grid or pattern that fills the page and that I try to fill up with something meaningful. It works pretty well. It sets up a fairly tight composition from the get-go and establishes a framework that’s woven into itself very closely.

One of the problems with using that sort of framework is that it’s fairly inescapable. Once you’re past a point that comes pretty early in the process… you really can’t make many changes or break out of the “grid” without throwing the entire thing out of whack. I do escape that to some extent when I translate the entire thing into forms like those in “On the Street“. That can be a little restrictive as well.

The idea, with this sort of image is to break away from the grid and define it as an object; something like Tanguy‘s done in some of his more complex paintings. I’ve done something similar by introducing negative space into the grid or, sometimes… not even using the grid at all. 🙂 I’m talking paintings that use a grid though.

This painting is fairly basic and actually required a bit of restraint on my part. I have a few of these going; figures, faces and so on. The intent with them is to treat the entire (grid) thing as a sort of standing form made up of many simpler forms. Basically, a blob of “stuff”. This particular piece reminds me of a sort of science fiction city or spaceport. I’m going to go with that. It also feels a bit like early Modernist abstraction, like Kandinsky‘s constructions or something by Leger, to me. I’m going to push that as well. I’m a little obsessed with that period of art anyway.

You might be asking yourself: “Why do this?”. “Why should I care?”, might occur to you as well. In response to the latter… Seriously… I don’t know. I’ll just assume that if you’ve actually read this far you have some interest in art. In response to the former… Frankly, it’s about breaking out of something of a rut I seem to have driven myself into and, as with pretty much everything… it’s a matter of exploration, experimentation and so on.

Things started with a scribble in water soluble graphite. I blocked in a few things with colored pencil then decided that was simply wasting my time. The drawing’s sealed with a couple of coats of UV resistant clear acrylic. I went straight to oils after that: cadmium red deep, chrome green, Naples yellow light and Payne’s grey mixed with a bit of titanium white. The “background” is raw umber mixed with titanium white. The paper is Canson’s linen texture oil paper.