Evolution of a Painting

I never sit down and know exactly what my painting is going to look like, and how to exactly get there. I find creating that kind of painting to be stifling, as though I already know where I’m going? So how do I know when I’m done when I like bushwhacking. Every time I get to work, I let the painting tell me what to do. If you’re ever feeling over whelmed working on something, or its not going the way you want it to, let go of your idea of what is should be and just let it be what it is. Think about what needs to be done today, or even in the next 10 mins. But let go of your preconceived idea of what its supposed to be.

So why is realism so important? The trick of any painting isn’t how well you can render an object, or how good of a likeness you can make of someone if you can’t get the thing to “sit” in the space you’re putting it in. It has to have gravity, you need to visually feel the weight of the subject. The best class I ever took was learning how to draw to the spaces between objects, essentially the nothing. It was a grueling, boring class. Lots of drawing boxes that overlapped into space, diagraming. At one point we had to draw a model, but draw the side we couldn’t see. If you look at Matisse’s work, especially his torn paper collages, you can see what I mean. Deceptively simple, just bold colored shapes. Yet you feel the pull of the floor, the solidness of the wall.

Ive come back around to incorporating realist aspect into my abstract work, veering on surreal. This deer painting series started out as more of modern cave painting, with individual groups of animals, but stylistically rendered in a kind of “proto” form.This painting I’ve been slowly working on over the course of a year. It’s a great way to show how where you start with isn’t always where you’re going.