painting: The Enchanted Forest (with Kristen)
Mike and Kristen's flat is a lovely place to hang out. It's small, cosy, full of books and little hippyish treasures. And paintings. Paintings everywhere. Kristen paints acrylic on board and canvas, and she paints for fun rather than profit; her art is spontaneous and experimental. But when she spends time on something, the results are incredible. Her art is stylised and tribal; there are paintings that have a post-apocalyptic or shamanic feel to them, bold colours and african sunsets. She is visible in most of her figures, and they are magical, sensual, visceral. I've told her she should exhibit in London; she'd love to, but didn't realise it was possible. I know a couple of places, though, so we should be able to arrange it. Personally, I'm envious of her having a collection substantial enough to exhibit by accident, as it were; she's been painting for years without ever really trying to sell them.
I have no experience with acrylics, but there was something so tempting about Kristen's style that I was itching to throw myself in and have a go. Surrounded by her artworks, and using her art materials (very different from my own methods) it was hard not to copy her style; but I suppose that exchanging methods and ideas is the point of the exercise, and the resulting synthesis will benefit us both. Acrylics are very suited both to two people working on the same painting at once, and to spending a day achieving quick, visible results. I definitely learned about spontaneity and experimentation, about abstract art, about starting putting colour on a canvas without knowing what it'll turn into, and letting it speak to you.
We started with making potato stamps. I don't know when I learned to do this, but it must have been primary school because I can't remember ever doing it before, but I somehow knew how. We sort of made it up as we went along. It was fun and messy, and we ended up with a bunch of stamps including a leaf, a mushroom, a seagull, and some random squiggles. Then we spent some time both sponging background colour onto a large canvas (I can't remember exactly what size). Acrylic is amazingly quick to work with.
After stopping for a break and a smoke, we went back to the canvas and started playing with stamps, and putting more colour on the painting. I can't remember this phase very clearly, but after an hour or so we sat back on our heels and looked at it, and realised that the painting basically had two very disparate halves. Both were sort of dreamy and magical, but one side was all purple and blue, and the other was all red and green. After looking at it for a while we decided that it was an enchanted forest; the red half was the undergrowth and the other half was the canopy and the sky. We went back in and tried to tie the composition into a more coherent whole. It was all still very abstract at this stage. Every so often we'd stop and prop the canvas up to examine it and work out what was missing, or what needed changing. Once we were into the details, we sort of informally took it in turns to work on it rather than both painting at the same time.
By the time it got dark, we'd created this:
I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. I've never painted anything like this before, and it was a lot of fun, but I have no idea if there's a market for this sort of artwork. It's very ... hippy. And hippies aren't famous for having lots of money to spend on art.
On the other hand, it was a first collaboration: I imagine once we get into the swing of working together and settle into a joint style, rather than a meeting of two disparate ones (especially since I wasn't really working in my own style anyway; I was playing with new materials and methods), we'll be producing better work. It'll be interesting to see how our joint style develops, and how it affects each of our individual styles :)