Lots of paint was put down today. After some days of consideration and idealization I finally acted on the desire to essentially emulate the fauvist paintings that I adore so much. I took two trips across the street to the park today and made some quick sketches in order to have a skeleton of a composition to put down on my large canvas. This wasn't an objectively large canvas but for me who typically paints on 8 x 10 and 5 x 7 inch panels these days it was.
It was a very productive exercise. I don't think I like the result so far, I have painted about 3/5ths of the composition and there are some passages I like however as an entirety it is not working. It is too restrained. It is too much of a coloring book. I began the painting with a very heavy emphasis on line in the form of the Sakura solid marker (largely because I had so much success with it the night before) - and ultimately ended up preserving probably too much of that line as I slowly eliminated the white of the canvas.
The Fauvist paintings are so free and loose, in form, line and more especially in color. This canvas I began today (which I will likely not finish) is not free in any of those regards. But it’s okay. I know that was an extremely worthwhile expenditure of my time. It's easy to fall into the trap of looking at a painting thinking it would be easy to recreate that effect and quickly find that it isn't. It’s good to be humbled. How many people have looked at a Pollock and thought “I could do that.” - many - but how many people have actually acted on the assumption and found out that they can't?
The more I let that imaginary composition on paper simmer from last night the more I like it and the more I want to pursue that line of inquiry. I know there is something there - Magdalene thought so too. Magdalene oftentimes has a very good intuition in these regards. I began painting walls in a very abstract and imaginative manner. In the preceding years I retreated more into the worlds of pursuing technique and rendering from source material - be it from photo reference or from life. These were extremely valuable side quests - if you could even call them that.
It may be time to revisit some old more innate expressive tendencies. It couldn't hurt. After all, the ultimate goal here is to forge a new way of seeing. To create something completely new and unique happening within the picture frame that has never been done before. It often feels like there is nothing new under the sun and that everything that's worth doing has already been doing yada yada - but how could that be? Both in the worlds of painting and in the realm of living, how could that be the case?
There are absolutely new pictures to make, paintings that have never been made nor conceived and that’s exactly what the ultimate intent of my aim as a painter is to achieve. The works I typically make - like for shopoilpaintings.com for example - are not new nor revelatory. They are extremely fun to make and highly aesthetic, the brushwork and the interpretation is completely my own but they’re not NEW pictures in any real sense.
Even emulating the Fauves, those aren't pictures that haven't already been made. They are extremely fun and there is a lot to borrow from those paintings but those expressive landscapes have been made already.
But perhaps my inventive landscapes populated by inventive people with the expressive quality of the Fauvist painters have not been made yet, not even close in fact. And on the subject of materiality and technique I know for certain that there is something there when it comes to the play of the oil against the scratchy block-in line of the Sakura marker.
I can envision a successful picture when all these elements come together in a robust fashion. These pictures also need to be big! These cant exist on small 8 x 10 or even 12 x 16 inch sheets of Arches oil paper - even though the tooth of that paper does seem to result in the most interesting textures from the Sakura markers. Anyway - with time all will be done, but there is no doubt a certain urgency to the moment and now is the time to make these experiments.
A portion of tomorrow’s time spent painting will be invested in making another small panel for this collection here. Magdalene’s sister gave us some plant hangers for the window which means I can compose a plant arrangement in the window and have the subject be backlit in a way that I believe will make for a very different painting in the catalog. I will also make a painting video about it for YouTube and it will be a win-win in that regard.
This afternoon I posted the video of the glass arrangement painting and it ran up almost 1,000 views in the first hour and then completely sputtered out after that. It’s interesting how these algorithms work, it's a lot of spinning a roulette wheel (I thought of a better metaphor earlier that I now cannot think of). Whether a video hits or doesn't hit is ultimately of little consequence but I will continue to develop this habit as it will be one of my streams of generating traffic for this website.
Speaking of this website, tomorrow I will publish it. My plan is to not tell anyone for a few weeks and see how much organic traffic it will generate on its own, but for the sake of SEO it is important to get this thing out the simmering as soon as possible.
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