Blowing in the wind
Painting alone in my home studio (rather than at the Art Students League) for so long has left me a little adrift. Instead of having a plan for a particular painting in mind, I’m just sorta, well, a leaf blowing in the wind.
For Just Glow, the only plan I had was to a) work on unstretched raw canvas, b) cover it with white first to provide a base, and c) paint on dry canvas so I’d have some hard edges. I had some vague idea of painting a really abstract sunset… Once the the yellow, orange and red were down, I added the blue in varying intensities. Finally the (yellowish) white. The major difference here is that I didn’t wet the canvas first. So … Just Glow is another experiment.
I Wish is a variation on my painting from early April, Almost Clear. Both are acrylic on gessoed canvas with the focus on brush strokes to try to convey the wind. Both are painting over earlier paintings I didn’t like (don’t ask, they were really bad). And the colors are similar.
But I Wish is more similar in style to my “normal” atmospheric paintings. Even though you can see the individual brushstrokes to show the wind, there aren’t a lot of hard edges.
The three paintings I’m working on now will probably be very atmospheric as well, although the judicious addition of a hard edge here and there is appealing.
My experiments seem to be narrowing down a little. No promises though. If experience is any indicator, I’ll get comfortable with whatever the new technique is and then want to mix it up and try something new. The difference now that I’m just working from home is that it feels like one experiment after another. So far it’s not gelling into anything that resembles a “comfort zone.” We’ll see.
