How a painting progresses
I’ve been working on some paintings for the last few weeks. In this blog post I wanted to share these paintings with you and give a little insight into my thought process and painting process.
SETTING AN INTENTION
Before I started painting this series I spent some time thinking about the kind of paintings I wanted to make. I looked back at my sketchbooks and previous painted studies. I made a few notes on how I wanted the paintings to feel and be. Setting the broadest of intentions for the work. I wrote ‘dreamlike, bold, interesting objects.”
I chose to use acrylic paint as I wanted to build up layers of paint and for each painting to have a hidden history which occasionally reveals itself.
I also spent some time thinking about the colour palette.…but this changed in the process of making them. And then I started, My one definite plan was to keep coming back to the paintings day after day until they were finished and to use my sketchbooks as a resource and guide rope.
LAYERS OF PAINT
I built up layer after layer of paint, letting each painting take shape and become what it was going to become. These paintings were painted with Sennelier Abstract Acrylic Paint on 360gsm paper from a UK brand called Seawhite of Brighton.
I find when I work with acrylics in this way, it can be a fascinating journey of both discovery and concealment. The fact you can build up layer after layer is what makes painting with acrylics, for me, a dance between flow and frustration. It’s not until the later layers that the painting comes together and reveals itself.
STAGES OF PAINTING
In creating paintings this way, I seem to cycle through phases of ease and effort. The early layers start with a sense of play and possibility. I freely engage with the colours and paint. As I know that only tiny remnants, if any, of these early layers will show through in the final painting, there is a freedom and boldness that comes at the start.
Then comes the difficult middle bit, where it all looks a bit muddled and messy and I’m not sure what to do next. Each painting seems to oscilate between ugly and good looking so quickly. It’s in this middle phase where I am trying to consider composition and work out the direction of each painting and what it might become.
This middle phase always seems like a little bit of a tussle, a rewarding wrangle, I have to paint over sections I love to find a composition that works. Each painting frequently looks bad in this phase and I find it hard to believe it could ever become beautiful. But I persevere and keep going. Some days I leave the studio feeling like the paintings are worse than when I started the day. But then the next day everything just comes together and I can see what they might be.
The final phase of my painting process is where I refine, clarify and resolve each painting. Here I make smaller, less dramatic changes until I am happy that all the paintings are how they should be.
As these paintings progressed I kept thinking about making space, the importance of spaciousness, the sentimental importance of the objects we travel through life with….giving myself space to dream and unfurl. And somehow the final paintings do appear a little dream-like to me.
SPACE TO REFLECT
Once I believe they are all complete and finished, I leave them for a few days or more and keep coming back to them to see if I spot anything that jars, or distracts or doesn’t feel exactly right to me.
This time and space to reflect gives me a new perspective and more objectivity, Looking at them long and hard when I’m not in the process of actually painting them is a helpful thing.
And then believing they could be finished turns into knowing they are finished…. and they are.