Whislt I paint on a fairly regularly basis, not all my paintings reach the satisfaction bar, however that doesnt stop me putting the paint brush down and leaving the painting well alone. I critique my own paintings, always striving to improve on a particular technique or to get a better effect. The more I paint, the more I practise, the more opportunities for situations to arise for me to critique and improve.
Some of the paintings, I put to one side because I get too precious about them and fiddling with them will only make the painting become the disaster I'm trying to avoid, so they get shelved till it's ready to bring them out and complete. Others are completed but haven't quite made the grade for me. I recently painted a "Fairy Castle-esque" type painting and whilst I liked its composition, something about it urked me.
I like the concept and the floating Island idea but for me the castle is more squat then elongated, some shadows are missing, the ligtening is not realistic enough, it may sound like I'm nit picking yet these things are important to me. Perhaps I will revisit this painting.
Some paintings I have created have been very monochrome - so using just one colour and various degrees of that colour, however, they have turned out to be quite washed out and not quite how my mind envisaged them.
This one for instance is a dessert scene, with water very faintly to the left hand side of the picture and higher hills behind the darken dunes in the distance, plus some sand swills. The concept is there and there is room for improvement on this one. This painting was created at a time when I had not painted for many years, so lie the painting my style was very barren. this has been put away for at least 3 years.
Again after putting my brushes down and returning to painting with a more relaxed style of meditation painting I created the following painting:
This is a scene at sea and whilst I am not entirely unhappy with its composition, its still a bit wshed out for me - perhaps that's part of its charm. Perhaps this one will stay like it is.
Other paintings have been created for cathartic reasons, for instance I needed to shed some anger, which is an emotion that grates on me heavily, whilst I recognise it can be a useful emotion, for the most part it is a negative and destructive emotion and in this case it needed to be turned and churned out of me. The reason why I was angry is unimportant, getting rid of it was a challenge. So, I decided to use my Art and Photography as therapy tools and took a series of photographs of me screaming at the camera.
The screaming helped release the tension and I ended up laughing ... think about it ... you're in your living room, camera on a tripod, facing towards a mirror and screaming at the top of your voice, a deep elongated grunting screams, very tribal, very raw, emotion screaming at you and then you photograph it ... timing is everything ... and keeping your throat from getting sore is important ... yet this primal screaming exercise worked. To finish I furiously painted my portrait in blood red based on one of those photographs. Here's the painting ...
Here's the photograph it was based on ...
This is still unfinished, I chose vampire teeth as that side of things have fascinated me for some time and the hair will change, I think this is due to be finished. the eyes are skew deliberately as being angry had thrown me off kilter and they are slightly bloodshot to go with the feel of tremendous anger.
So, whilst all my paintings aren't as I like them to be, they are not entirely on the cutting floor, they can be amended, adapted, altered, changed, manipulated to make them more akin to my original concept and that's one of the things I love about art. Even better each painting helps with the evolution process and growth for me as an artist, just like my photography helps with my art skills too.
No comments:
Post a Comment