New year, new work

A couple of the recent pieces I have been working on have been put aside for a while. Instead I started a new piece (top) and totally worked over an old piece.

A million magic crystals

Until a few days ago, these were two finished paintings. I hacked them apart and started again. They may be heading somewhere new. They may not be. It is too early to tell. One thing for sure is that they look different to the last few paintings.

About to be writ again

Stop thinking about what you don't have and enjoy what you do (20"x16")

Insert self improving message here (16"x12")

Two more that might well be finished, although I'm not fully certain. The top one may have too many colours.

Unmolten

There has been more painting going on here than there has been for a while. This piece is one of the newest ones and it is going somewhere a bit different. It is at that exact stage where it looks like it could be finished now but I know needs something more.

The answer

This might be the first time I feel like I've done a proper grown-up paper. Might be.

New layers

The experimenting goes on. These two have been gradually evolving over the past few months. They've both got a long way to go. The newest addition is Lazertrans.

Unfixed

Untitled work in progress, 16x12"

 I went too far with this one a few week ago. I've been looking at it ever since. Yesterday I had a go at it with some white paint and a litte ink. It looks a bit better now. A bit. Still a long way to go...

Not much order here

I don't really know where this is going right now. I've been looking at it for a few weeks now. The chaos I am happy with. Order, however, I am finding hard to, well, find. As above, so below, I guess.

The instant photo is not fixed yet. It is just a thought. It may move. The orientation may slip back to upright as well.

I go to sleep

Last week's works in progress are still in progress and unfortunately in a less finished state than last week. I shall persevere and perhaps next week one or both will make another appearance. In the mean time, I think I have finally put this bugger to rest.

The canvas has had more incarnations that a thing with a lot of incarnations. It started out a few years ago as a pop art flower, before impacting with a night of out-of-this-world Sun Ra tributary music . This incarnation suffered from the never knowing when to quite problem, before being pushed into an even stupider place.

At the end of last week I spread some very lumpy plaster on it and then prompty ignored the resulting mess, figuring that once again I had made an arse of it. However, when I was stuck waiting for the other two works-in-progress dry, I had a little fiddle with it. A drippy, splashy fiddle. I then left it too to dry.

A few days later, I was sorting through my pile of text and something in the 'grinning' quote and this one just clicked. I had a slightly sinister chuckle, then spent longer than seems feasible figuring out where the text would fit on the canvas. Eventually I got it to work (the canvas is now flipped 180º from its earlier incarnations), before adding a little garden twine and declaring it finished. (Well, for this year!)

Red return

Untitled work in progress, 20x16"

 

Untitled work in progress, 12x16"

After so many, many months of inactivity, this week I have finally applied some paint to a surface using implements. It felt good. Very good. I don't know where I'm going with these, there is no plan behind them, no thoughts or intentions. Unthinking, subconscious work seems the best way forward right now. Thinking and planning can come once I've got back into the swing.

It won't be long

At last I've managed to create something I quite like. The angles were formed with thread on the wet plaster surface, very quickly and with little pre-meditation. Now to see if I can build a series from this. Damn. I think I'm calling this one finished!

Hold onto this

Another not right piece here. I think I was intimidated by its larger size. The composition and balance is all wrong and the leaf looks completely out of place. This has been sitting about for a few weeks and I'm no closed to finding a solution for it. The clock is ticking now, though.

A happy 'accident'

For the past few weeks, I've tinkered away with the brown painting. Some time during the middle of this week, even though it is by no means finished, I put it aside to begin work on a new piece. Firstly, it felt like the brown painting needed a little time alone to simmer but secondly, and more importantly, there was something new I really wanted to try. It stemmed from a conversation I had last month with my friend Richard, when he suggested that one way for me to move forward may be to try to combine my painting and photograpy. Since then, I've thought of several ways to do so and this new painting is going to be mt first attempt at acheiving this.

For this post, I'm going to put that aside to concentrate on a small detail that I am enjoying particularly on this new piece. This idea was lifted from one of the things that happened on the brown canvas.

What I've tried to do here is to bleed one of my lovely, lovely orange paints out of titanium white, to wash across the canvas. A river of orange, so to speak. Later I added in some black ink, which has rather taken over. However the ink is water-soluable and is unlikely to remain where it is for long.

I like both the startlingly stark colour combination, against the relatively plain background, and the way that the colour cuts through the background texture.

Of course, looking at it again, I realise that it looks like I have a pet bird that eats orange paint and likes to stand on the edges of my paintings…