I wrote last week about a work in progress for a friend that's modeled after her painting, Memoria. I finished this painting this week and titled it 'Sunlit Depths.' Whereas I saw Memoria as an abstract depiction of a melding between light and dark, or the point at which memory fades into nothingness, I see this piece as an abstraction of the way that the sun touches plants, or the way that some things lie below sunlight.
The acrylic details I added differ slightly from Memoria's as well. Memoria has a silver sheen that enhances the action of the dark meeting the light paint. This painting used acrylics to round out and brighten the 'bubbles' that are in the left-hand top corner, mimic the pink streaks on the right-hand side, and add depth to the dark paint at the bottom left. The acrylics wrap around to the sides, as does the oil paint. They're very hard to capture on camera, but in physical view, they catch the light and draw the eye to the correct places. I'm quite happy with this one, so I'm thinking about painting an even larger piece in a similar style.
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I've been working on these two paintings for quite a bit longer than I'd like. Painting lately has become a push-pull struggle between too dark and too light/bright, where a work will goes through several stages before settling in. However, both of these were way too bright and busy for my tastes. A frenzy with some black paint ended up making them better in some ways but worse in others, so last night I took my good friend the fan brush and made them white and wispy. I'm no longer afraid of the end result, but I do feel as though a bit more black paint, and then some judicial use of acrylics, might save them. I'll post more pictures as they develop, but 98% of the work is in my head, trying to figure out exactly where to apply the brush before it happens. I sent this painting to a friend for Christmas and they loved it so much that a friend of their friend wanted one just like it. Well, 'just.' I've been feeling inspired by the various paint/draw this again challenges that ask you to take an older piece of work, something seminal that you felt represented your best at the time, and redo it now. It's a great way for artists to judge the distance between their old work and their current ability. Sure, I painted this in November 2014--just over a year ago. Yet, I saw one in my mind's eye that had some improvements done. I've mentioned before that it's hard to capture the acrylic sheen on my oil + metallic acrylic paintings. This is still true. However, this painting represented my best work at the time, and a technique that I first tried in college--painting something that appears to be coming out of or going into the white space of the canvas. Here's the result: I wanted to play more with the idea of light bands, so I used a fan brush over the main architecture in the bottom left-hand corner. I also wanted there to be more artifacts, so I added blue circles by spinning a small brush and pink lines with the fan brush as well as a highlight brush.
When it's dry, I'll add acrylic details similar to Memoria's and clean up the dining room table so it's not a mess of computer parts and paintings. |
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