Abstract painting.

Part 1

Every year I give something up for my new years resolution, but as 2025 is looming and resolutions are on the horizon, I’ll give something up AND take something up. I’m going to take up abstract painting for 2025.

There’s something wonderfully enjoyable about it, about the process. It’s indulgent - like when you put some paint on a surface simply for the sake of putting that paint on the surface, and then covering it up with another and another…multiple painted layers. It requires one to be wasteful…wasting paint in order to discover some rich quality in the building up of layers that will never be seen… these unseen layers can be felt through the surface though… like the footsteps you heard yourself make yesterday but no longer can be heard today.

Free from form, free from expectation, free from objectification…Abstract painting is freeing. Here you are free to explore the materials without the constraints of drawing something accurately. It’s playful. It awakens the inner child and the wise intellect at the same time. The child plays with the tools and materials, seeing what they do, what one can do with them without direction. The wise intellect makes many decisions where there’s no rules to obey, no boundaries to consider. The intellect makes up the rules and then sticks to them, bends them or breaks them to achieve a good outcome. (“good” is what a ‘wise’ person achieves where possible, methinks.)

In abstract painting I have the opportunity to explore colour, mediums, paint, texture, layering, composition, mixed media materials, recycled supports, taste, style, design, repetition, brushes, mark making, tools and time.

Freed from form, freed from expectations of accurately drawing something representational, all critique becomes subjective.

I don’t know why I like it. Not really. Often I don’t even know what it’s even meant to be.

Everyone sees something different in an abstract painting.

“Murmurations” said Krysh when she looked at this above painting. It reminded her of a flock of starlings as they fly around…changing direction as they do….incredibly not flying into each other and getting tangled up. Echos of movement.

Above is Murmurations 1 and 2, and below is Split System 2. These paintings with the repeated paint strokes were therapeutic to paint…calming. I wonder if a similar feeling of therapeutic calmness affects the viewer when looking at them?

I like these repetitive paint lines and these half circles…”circley squares” we called them in class during the recent abstract project at Splashout art studios.

We have a lot of fun in class.

portrait of a man, 45×45cm

Oil portrait

I haven’t painted with oils for a while - well not at my own pleasure anyway, so that’s what i’m going to do with this portrait.

I selected a board with some acrylic underpainting on it (I keep a stack of these ready to go with random bits of colour on them which i’ve offloaded from my pallet at the end of painting sessions, and or painted with gesso.

The board I selected is painted with a dark indigo, then with some green grey gesso marks on top of that. I want to use a limited pallet so I’ll choose some colours with this underpainted board in mind.

Viridian, raw umber, burnt sienna, permanent rose, yellow ochre, titanium white.

The pallet

mixed some colours and now I’m ready to start

Before I make a start I mix a full pallet of colours. This is the main advantage oils has over acrylics so may as well take full advantage of this feature. I never do this with acrylic paints, never ever EVER!!

I kind of forget what I’m doing for a sec…I’m so use to acrylics.

Ive painted a monster!

Oh yeah, that’s right…I want some paint down so I can paint wet on wet - I break a few rules and don’t use any medium to thin the paint, so it’s straight paint on straight paint, nice and creamy.

yep, loving the process… it’s about now I need to chop in from the background and push the subject forward, so I decide to mix a grey using what’s on my pallet with a little Paynes grey to add some blue to the mix. I figure that subtle difference will barely be noticed, but will be different enough to do what I want. So…

I’m happy with that.

The end.

Portraits - 6 week short course

Just finished facilitating a 6 week short course at Splashout Art Studios. It’s been a fun and interesting journey with a great group of 10 lovely participants. I’m so grateful for their enthusiasm and courage to try the things presented in this course, and their encouragement and curiosity towards my own methods of painting.

We’ve covered alot of ground with great results, and as always I learnt alot myself as we wrestle through what it is I’m attempting to teach. So many great questions came up during the course, some questions that had me thinking for days…and that’s the beautiful thing about teaching, you learn even more about what you already know…or at least think you already know.

lesson 1

The first lesson we looked at the structure of the head facing forward.

To make this an interesting lesson I needed to put together a task that participants could do to explore drawing front facing heads with paint.

lesson prep

playing around in my journal in the days before the first lesson helps me figure out what will work as a task to complete within the 2.5 hours lesson time.

All participants did a great job for the first lesson, I thought.

lesson 2

For the second lesson we looked at turned heads. This is alot more complicated because there’s so many variations and possibilities for a head that’s turned and/or tilted. We practiced drawing the template on paper together, from different angles using both a reference photo and from imagination.

For this lesson’s task we explored drawing the tilted head with two colours plus white oil paint using solvent as a thinner.

Burnt sienna and viridian plus white is a fabulous limited pallet to explore faces with.

For this task we all painted the same image to start with.

lesson 3

for this lesson we looked at the profile and skin.

we really covered alot of ground in this lesson so I forgot to take photos of all the work, like I should’ve taken photos of the pallets and the colour mixing which took up at least half of the lesson.

for my own preparation I painted one of the images we were looking at during my presentation.

I thought I’d be clever and paint on lovely Japanese paper but I ran into an unexpected difficulty when the ultra porous paper didn’t do what I intended it to do. ha! another problem to solve.

lesson 4

we looked at features and revisited skin and tried the skin pallet on a coloured ground. Again…should’ve taken more photos but was too engrossed in the process.

lesson 5 & 6

For the last two lessons, participants painted a portrait of their choosing on a stretched canvas. For this final painting they can put into practice the things they’ve learnt in the previous lessons, and some participants even had time to revisit one of their earlier studies and add another layer…

check out the work below, aren’t they fabulous!!

bibliography:

thanks to Tracy for the video footage and the photos of me.

Thanks to Splashout Studios, Krysh and Gaynor for all the hard work being the scenes.

Burgundy...

is a colour I’ve grown to love. It’s not an exotic colour - it’s more like a school uniform colour, or a airport lounge kind of colour. It’s corporate, it’s inoffensive, it’s easy to mix.

as I’ve been exploring with burgundy, I’ve been weirding the pallet into some of the strangest combinations.

Burgundy and Orange

I used both permanent orange and fluro orange to up the bright factor

So after using Burgundy in a number of paintings over the past few weeks (or months even…loosing track here…)…

…I set myself another challenge - to close my eyes and choose a colour at random from my paint box to work with my next burgundy painting.

Mars Grey. …I was a little disappointed at first…not sure why because this was a recent purchase and I haven’t used it as yet. Anyway, as fate would have it I closed my eyes again and selected another colour - Crimson. What? too much like orange… I put it back and decided to go with my first pick.

…using mars grey and burgundy I map out a head on a board that happened to be primed with Midnight Blue.

It doesn’t take long for me to want to add another colour so I add yellow ochre and the background colour, midnight blue, to my pallet and I see how far I can get with these colours.

I don’t want to do more than I have to at any stage of the painting process because I love the effect of the economical paint marks at the early stages of painting - to keep these it’s important not to over work the painting and to do that realise that I need a warmer light…some kind of white or very light pink/yellow so I can get some light tones that are different from the grey. Decisions…decisions…

I add the crimson (my second blind choice) and vintage white to my pallet. The light’s I’m already using look really light against the black background but when I add the white you can really see how dark the other lights are.

it’s about now I consider changing the background colour, or doing something with it…more decisions….decisions…

really when you think about it, painting is alot of decision making.

I test burgundy first…used up what was left on my pallet and then I try olive green light…a new colour I bought the other day so I thought I’d give it a go. I like it

…so now it’s a matter of refining the face and touching up the background again and I second I’ll be done.

Finally, I photograph the finished work in filtered daylight on both my iPhone and my Nikon using a macro lens. The images appear so different, and as usual, I can’t decide which one is better so I’ll pop them both here and let you decide.

The end.

choosing colours...

..is something I want to explore more thoroughly during 2024.

I’ve been playing around with weird colour combinations in my paintings - These weird colour pallets I happen across by chance through the painting process. I’ll choose a colour to draw out my design, then choose a lighter or darker tone to add some detail - be that depth or highlights, as part of the initial drawing stage of a painting. This additional second colour is chosen for it’s tone not it’s colour and it’s after I’ve painted with it that I observe what the colours actually feel like together - both how they sit next to each other and the colours they make when mixed together.

it’s not always pretty…

First I painted the green and pink grounds without knowing what I was going to do with it. When I was ready to do my studies I grabbed a dark tone (burgundy) and a light tone (light pink) to draw with, then chose the light green to isolate the subject. The pallet resolved itself during the process and now I have a weird colour pallet that I can use again without a thought, and add more colours to in a larger work.

Colours can change the feeling of a painting - sometimes just layering colours on top of colours helps me find a solution. I choose a colour for it’s tone and warmth or coolness rather than it’s colour, to see if it works but I don’t really care if it doesn’t work well because the layers add so much depth and interest that it’s worth the experiment if I do choose to paint a different colour over the top.

Below is a head I’m working on - on the left it’s feeling drab and messy so I know I need to make a drastic change to the background. I grab a tub of straw yellow gesso and block out the drab.

Why straw yellow? I guess it sort of jumped out at me when I looked through my pile of paint. I’ve used it before in a background so I know it’s a workable background kind of yellow… …so having put some down I don’t mind the yellow even though it needs refining, So now I’ll continue with the face.

Working on the face I’m using the pallet I started with, not adding any of the straw yellow, I will keep that seperate. This creates a “pop” factor rather than a harmony thing. Sometimes I like harmony and will limit the pallet to get that and mix all the colours together to make all the tones, both in the background and in the subject.

finishing… this little portrait was a matter of refining what I’ve already got and adding more layers of the same to add depth and to neaten it up so that the general visual effect isn’t messy and chaotic, but there’s still messy marks to be seen as you look more closely at the work. A sweet spot between chaos and order kind-of-thing.

Another thing Ii want to look at again is the difference between photographing my work with my phone camera and my Nikon DSLR. I’ve noticed the Nikon makes a much softer photo while still showing the detail, where my phone exaggerates everything. The Nikon shows the painting more accurately to how my eyes see it in real life at a normal viewing distance, and the phone shows it as if I was looking at it really close, like a nose distance away, with strong light so is better for viewing on a phone and in thumbnail situations, where the Nikon is better for viewing on a large screen and making printed copies I guess.

check it out - Nikon 59mm macro lens on the left, phone camera macro setting on the right.

The end.


Content...CONtent...conTENT

For the last year and a half I moved my blog to the Substack platform, mainly to make use of their subscriber features and to see if I preferred it to my own blog setup on my website. Today I thought I’d return to my website blog to see the difference.

Writing blogs, making youtube videos, posting art pics and making short form videos, like reels, is interesting and alot of fun for me. I do enjoy creating the content side of things when it comes to my art practice.

So, now that I’m back on my website blog for a bit, I’ve paused subscriptions to my substack. Thankyou to all who subscribed there and I really feel honoured that so many people took the time to read through my stuff.

a little bird told me to

…go back to my website blog…

So, for my youtube offerings in 2024, I set up a painting-live-stream that posts on youtube. Here I’m using two cameras, one to show what’s going on on my pallet and the other on my painting. These live stream videos are long format. (they do go on and on and on…) but they are easy to produce because there’s no editing required. I also like them because the recording is stored on youtube for as long as my channel is up…so I don’t have to record and save anything on my phone (I use my phone to record everything) - it’s like the slack persons way of making youtube videos…so I’m thinking… I could literally and legitimately start my own production company if I use a name like “Terribly Boring Productions.” (smily face emoji)

Another thing I need to remember to do here on my website which I didn’t on the substack blog - and I must say for anyone who doesn’t have a website blog spot but wants one, Substack is an awesome platform - is manually save everything where Substack does it automatically.

I must save…save…and save…as I go.

flowers for Friday.

Abstract marathon...

I took a long run with this painting and managed to capture the journey, so here it is.

The first stages went according to plan…

… but then when I wanted to create some space things got a little weird.

it’s hard to believe it is the same painting I started but them…

…finally I got some clarity when a little bird told me what I should do with it!!

red cardinal

A page a day...

…diary is something I started using at the beginning of this year, and as the year has progressed I’ve found it more and more helpful.

Patty, my sister, told me to write a list every morning - “write the things that need doing no matter how small, and tick them off as you go.”

So, for the first time this year I bought myself a page-a-day diary and I’ve been writing lists on it every day, carrying things over to the next day if I don’t get them done, as well as writing in the things I need to do in advance, like appointments on those days. It’s a great system.

A Busy week

It looked like I might have to miss this weeks blog as I have been so busy this week - I wrote “blog” on my list on Thursday…carried it over to Friday…Sat…it’s now 10:19pm and I’ve completed a painting that I wanted to finished for Monday, and as I have a workshop tomorrow, prepared for that, and had a class this morning that I also prepared for, I needed to do it today…tonight…

a few hours later and it’s done.

Normally I’d retire for the evening by now, I’m reading a good book at the moment “American Dirt” which will probably put me to sleep if I start now, and I need to stay awake until 12pm when I’m picking up daughter no 2 from a party.

The story of the Bison

I needed to paint a painting to replace one that sold in the salon.

“Paint a Bison”, said daughter no 1, so that’s what I did and enjoyed every minute of it too :)

It’s not a very exciting story but the painting itself is exciting which really is testament to the Old Artist’s Proverb - “It’s not what you paint, it’s how you paint it.”

ContinuinG…

…with the visual poetry exploration in-between the other stuff I’m working on. These little poems are, for me, interesting and fun.

Interesting because I’m able to take bits from the past, be them ideas or materials, and marry them with the present. I can weave some kind of story in too, with words. Perhaps I could string them all together into an exhibition, a calendar, a pack cards with recipes on the back, or a book.

Fun because they are small, inexpensive to make and quick to assemble…I can leave them unfinished without worrying about waste, or spend time finishing them depending on how much I’m enjoying the outcome. I can limit the materials I use and create them anywhere, in or out of the studio.

Something old, something new.

The Lobster mornay and creme burlee… they don’t just want to be elected!

The random, abstracted quality of the illustrations allows for some wildly obscure thought, or thought bubbles.

something borrowed

out of lobster., burlee as a concept only

how random can I make this I wonder…

a robot wronged a human as did creme burlee

now there’s a thought - what has humans invented that has been good for the individual, good for the group and good for the environment - like absolutely good with no down side to it whatsoever?

Something blue

the end.