Following a feeling
When does a painting start being a painting? Sometimes I think it’s just a design. It works in a way, the eye goes where it should go. They look pleasing enough but there’s no excitement. There’s no feeling, they have no soul. I thought these paintings were impossibly tight. I thought I needed to get looser and throw some paint at them. I was annoyed with myself. I thought maybe I can’t paint in this miserable weather.
What happened was that I started editing them instead. I actually cleaned up some areas and sharpened some edges. Pushing the differences creates feeling. It is differences that bring you alive, not just action painting. Differences in colour, but differences in edges too, between thick and thin paint. Make the uncontrol look wilder with some tight control next to it. I found joy in doing this as much as the heroic paint throwing. I enjoy what I can now do with colour and I enjoy making decisions. I remember watching Mark Eanes paint, as part of a course I enrolled in and being so excited by the way he would make decisions as part of his process. The seeing what was there and making changes was part of the way of painting I loved but had forgotten about. I wanted that dialogue back in my life.
In the first painting I made the green area flat colour again, to be more different from the wispy edged white opaque glazed bits. I sharpened up the purple line to do the same. In the second painting I made the trowelled on purple mark much stronger by the area of empty blue space and the sharp orange edge on the right. Strong differences create feeling. I am excited to see that empty space can be a powerful difference. Areas of flat colour in magazine photographs have always been on my inspiration board. I feel my painting is finally catching up with my ideas. I have carried a spider diagram around in my wallet for years now, pf what I needed my abstract painting to be like, and its only now that my process is starting to match up with it. Neither of these paintings are quite finished yet, I can see other things I might do, but it’s interesting to notice what the paint is teaching me this week.