A blank canvas. Sometimes this can be the most intimidating bit of the world that excist. How do you start? Where does the ideas come from? What is an idea worth attaching to a canvas?
I was inpired by a few things:
- An animation narrated by David Lynch, Happiness is in the doing:
- My friend Renee sent me some links to some excellent painting tutorials on intuitive painting with Flora Bowley
- A surreally nice sunny day on a small beach with two of my girlfirends, Natalie and Kirsti.
I decide to approach this, the unknown, with a technique I learned in highschool. “Kill your babies”. The idea is to not get attached to elements in your picture, that will stop the flow of creativity.
I just start to paint onto an old painting I found in a secondhand shop, it had a great gold frame around it. Adding colors randomly on the canvas. Get some sort of textured background. Let it dry.
Lets dive into it: I add a bright red contrast color and just let the paintbrush flow. It creates some human like shapes. Some dots. The dots turn into leafy shapes on the left side.
I like the leafy shapes. Keep working with these, painting over the human shapes. Kind of cool, but feels too soon, to random, not finished. I keep going…
Whoops, a slight change has happened. I kept working on the stenciling of the background, but instead of leaves, its now circular shapes and dots around the canvas. And the head and body of a bird has appeared, with a bright sun over it.
I don’t feel good about the bird somehow. It’s not going to be a bird picture, I keep going and while i paint, my friend sends me a photo from a recent trip we did to the seaside. A huge beetle crossed the drawing i was working on, lying on the grass. It crawled across my lines and colors, and the bright sun cast its huge shadow onto my paper. I decide mr. beetle has to go on my canvas.
Mr. Beetle
The surreally nice and sunny day on the beach.
I like the beetle. But something is not working with the colors and the sparkly colorful shapes around it, even though they really reflect the brightness of the day by the sea.
I cover the corners with a darker blue, and suddenly i have just removed the colorful shapes all together. I just wasn’t right. I killed my babies with no remorse. The darker calms the picture, and the paintbrush starts to work on its own accord. I dont feel precious about anything. And i like how the light colors come out from behind the beetle shape, and fades into the blur. It’s like the beetle is walking on water, creating rings of movement in it, as well as reflecting the sky. Now i just have to decide what color to paint the gold frame in!
So, how did this way of working pan out?
- I felt insecure, like being blind folded
- It was hard to work with abstract shapes, i didn’t feel inspired
- I was not comfortable with colors, what works together and not
- I got lots of practice with paintbrushes, textures, mixing colors, effects with stenciling
- Great way to meet insecurity, as i didn’t get attached to any precious areas of the painting. As soon as i felt attached to something, i made a choice to paint over it, if it didn’t feel quite right.
- I realize i have a LOT to learn 🙂
- Inspiration DOES appear. Maybe not when i want it to, when i am standing in front the canvas, paintbrush in hand. But when i see a photo, read a blog, or book, something i see on the road, something a friend says. It’s there, waiting to be picked, like ripe fruit in the autumn.
I will certainly use some of the techniques on other paintings. And i feel i intuitively moved towards a style that was more “me”! I didn’t even know i had a style, but something happened as i worked on the canvas, a gut feeling, and it moved me into an area i felt more comfortable, with realistic shapes. I have a memory from when i was about 3; I was coloring in a picture. It was of horses. Their feet were really thin. But I managed to keep the pen inside the thin legs, and it looked good. I remember the feeling it gave me, of mastering something difficult. Controlling the pen. I was in charge. It seems I still value this about creating realistic elements in my paintings. Is this a path to follow, or should i work on the intuitive, “letting things happen on the screen” more? Perhaps for me it will always be a combo of control and letting go inside one canvas. An interesting game.