The problem child
One of my tutors once told me of a time he was trying to paint a sequence of works. It was a natural idea and it all just flowed : right up to the last piece, they just fell out of his brush, each perfectly formed and exactly how it had been envisaged, but the last one faught back. Days, weeks (or whatever) of fighting with it; painting over it, reworking sections, recovering from disasters eventually resulted in a piece that would complete the series semi-satisfactorily, but truth be told, had it not been required to showcase the others, it probably wouldn't have made it in front of an audience, such was the grief and dissatisfaction it had caused in its creation.
I've been working on pieces for Eastercon, and I've been doing starfields because I thought they'd be appropriate for the event. Anyone who watches the sketchblog has seen Equinoxe, but now Oxygene is lso complete and there's just Magnetic Fields would complete the trilogy I wanted to present, but it's really fighting me. I want it fundamentally different in feel to the others, because the music (in case anyone doesn't recognise the titles, they're named for the first three Jean Michel Jarre albums) has always been fundamentally different to me; Oxygene and Equinoxe are partner pieces, but Magnetic Fields is sharp, jagged and confrontational. There's more electronic interchange than lush atmospherics and rhythm and melody bounce off one another rather than flow together. I've even gone as far as painting it in a different orientation - the first two are squares (which I am fundamentally most comfortable painting in, which apparently is weird) and this one's a more traditional landscape oriented rectangle. I may yet exhibit it portrait just to screw up the perpective.
I've tried using inks. I bought a small selection of colours thinking that their richness dropped into a wet canvas would make a pleasant gradation, but it doesn't; their power is so much that they glow artificially from the painted surface making the scene look like it's been computer enhanced from a digital telescope rather than glimpsed by a far travelled eye. I've started scratching with them using a dip pen instead which made some interesting effects (especially to go with the jaggedness of the music) but I discovered something new and pretty fundamental about them when I returned to the piece this morning - the inks aren't waterfast - which means that, unlike acrylics, a dry area is reactivated by water, so when I took a glaze over to tone them down a bit they picked up the ink and the whole thing just unifed. Bugger. The practical upshot of this is that instead of the sort of balancing act I like to do, I have to know that I'm am finished with paint before moving in with the inks but it also raises questions about how they might react to varnish... My issues with this sort of discipline are exactly what keeps me painting in acrylics and not oils....
I've decided to step away from it for a bit and listen again to Magnetic Fields. I'm pleased that my idea of the music's feel hasn't changed, but there's an unearthly eeriness and a transitory element to it that I hadn't really focused on before. Maybe I can use that a little more; it certainly makes the artificialness of the inks slightly less inappropriate. Either way, a fresh approach is required and hopefully I'll be able to rescue it, even if it doesn't see as initially gratifying as its partner pieces because there is a happy ending to my tutor's tale. When the works were shown, the 'probelm child' garnered far and away the most interest and was the first to sell. The moral? That people, conciously or otherwise, know when there's a genuine struggle in a piece, where sweat and tears have gone into it - and they still value that.
I've been working on pieces for Eastercon, and I've been doing starfields because I thought they'd be appropriate for the event. Anyone who watches the sketchblog has seen Equinoxe, but now Oxygene is lso complete and there's just Magnetic Fields would complete the trilogy I wanted to present, but it's really fighting me. I want it fundamentally different in feel to the others, because the music (in case anyone doesn't recognise the titles, they're named for the first three Jean Michel Jarre albums) has always been fundamentally different to me; Oxygene and Equinoxe are partner pieces, but Magnetic Fields is sharp, jagged and confrontational. There's more electronic interchange than lush atmospherics and rhythm and melody bounce off one another rather than flow together. I've even gone as far as painting it in a different orientation - the first two are squares (which I am fundamentally most comfortable painting in, which apparently is weird) and this one's a more traditional landscape oriented rectangle. I may yet exhibit it portrait just to screw up the perpective.
I've tried using inks. I bought a small selection of colours thinking that their richness dropped into a wet canvas would make a pleasant gradation, but it doesn't; their power is so much that they glow artificially from the painted surface making the scene look like it's been computer enhanced from a digital telescope rather than glimpsed by a far travelled eye. I've started scratching with them using a dip pen instead which made some interesting effects (especially to go with the jaggedness of the music) but I discovered something new and pretty fundamental about them when I returned to the piece this morning - the inks aren't waterfast - which means that, unlike acrylics, a dry area is reactivated by water, so when I took a glaze over to tone them down a bit they picked up the ink and the whole thing just unifed. Bugger. The practical upshot of this is that instead of the sort of balancing act I like to do, I have to know that I'm am finished with paint before moving in with the inks but it also raises questions about how they might react to varnish... My issues with this sort of discipline are exactly what keeps me painting in acrylics and not oils....
I've decided to step away from it for a bit and listen again to Magnetic Fields. I'm pleased that my idea of the music's feel hasn't changed, but there's an unearthly eeriness and a transitory element to it that I hadn't really focused on before. Maybe I can use that a little more; it certainly makes the artificialness of the inks slightly less inappropriate. Either way, a fresh approach is required and hopefully I'll be able to rescue it, even if it doesn't see as initially gratifying as its partner pieces because there is a happy ending to my tutor's tale. When the works were shown, the 'probelm child' garnered far and away the most interest and was the first to sell. The moral? That people, conciously or otherwise, know when there's a genuine struggle in a piece, where sweat and tears have gone into it - and they still value that.