Sunday, January 3, 2016

DECEMBER 2015

It has been a very strange December.  No cold weather to speak of and no snow.  This has left me feeling a bit confused. I don't like cold weather but without it things just seem wrong.  The leaves are gone and the days are short but by the end of December there were plum trees in bloom and lily leaves starting to come up.  What next?

At the same time I have been experimenting with new types of painting support.  I am using a very hard flat surface called gesso panel.  Unlike canvas which absorbs some paint and has a semi rough texture this support is flat and hard.  I wanted to see if I could build the paint up a bit, creating texture with the brush as it left ridges while using a lot of paint.  In order to create areas that were defined I simplified the drawing so that each shape was discrete.

I wanted the color to say something without too much reference to the "scene".  So far the results have been mixed.  My latest painting somehow turned out quite different from what I planned and I am beginning to loose interest in this approach.

I am including my reference photo - the one I planned very carefully on the computer- and the finished work to show how things went wrong.  I'm not sure how I got so far away from the colors I had  planned as the combination of color is what I was interested in.  The feeling of the colors in the plan is quite different from the feeling of the colors in the final painting.  I wonder what happened.  It is the feeling of the colors in the plan that I was after.  That is how I feel about this December.   I am going to print it out on soft archival paper with archival ink.   I suspect my natural cheery nature took over and I simply needed to paint some bright color.


December 2015 plan



December 2015
9" x 12"
oil on gesso panel