Facing my nemesis
The one art medium that has remained mysterious is painting. Colors add a totally new dimension and scarily infinite possibilities to the form, shading and texture accessible with drawing, charcoal, and ink. In the past, mixing colors seemed time consuming and fussy - a hindrance to intuitive art making. And if I didn’t know what I was doing with charcoal, wasn’t painting a step too far? And so, I didn’t take a closer look at painting for years.
For this reason I was very excited, and also apprehensive, about the painting module that I’m now in the middle of. Best case, I demystify painting, worst case, I decide it is not for me.
As usual, we were invited to identify artists that we like the look of, and I selected Ellen Gallagher and Makiko Kudo. The colors in Kudo’s work are bright yet harmonious, and Gallagher’s can be more understated but with a feeling of intention. Gallagher uses texture and works paper like a sculptural material. Her works can be more abstract than Kudo, who often paints scenes with trees and plants and water and sky along with cartoonish figures. These two artists present a wonderful range of abstraction and color, awareness of positive and negative space, and joy and meaning to be inspired by. A thing to note, you get little sense of what size these paintings are in real life in my photos of printouts - most of them are huge - meters in dimension.
Perhaps this is the easiest time, when I have no expectation. I know, I will not love my first paintings, and it will be a while before I like them, or that they reflect anything about my style. Feeling the need to get as much practice in, I got stuck in, doing some painting for a couple of hours every day for a week. I did feel too untethered, unknowing of what to attach to and try, so I tried to copy the colors used in a Peter Doig painting. I also tried something observed on Youtube where the artist uses just ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, and globs of white, to paint an impressively expressive milk jug. Perhaps the most fun was doing my leftover paint paintings, where I attempted to use up the last of my paints in abstract forms.
Attracted to Gallagher’s structural paintings, I attempted to add texture and structure to my surface. I glued paper, and added baking soda to gesso and PVA glue to experiment with homemade pastes. PVA shrinks; gesso doesn’t. Also, to reduce the barriers to just doing, I took color inspiration from Gallagher’s and Kudo’s paintings. Should be pretty obvious which was which.
Obviously, one of the pieces is not a painting, but I enjoyed where the pieces of paper happened to end up that I glued them down. They were from a picture of the slabs of concrete that make a sidewalk, and were the mask for cutting the paper in the pastel painting. The bottom left and middle are just the grounds for painting, and are unfinished.
And now, the pressure is on! I have one week to make my submission for this module. Wish me luck.