So lately I’ve been working on a couple of pieces that are not at all what one would call “in my style”. They are in the realist tradition of sorts. One is of a city scene and the other is a painting of a bicycle crank.
I haven’t had any real ideas or visions about where my painting (abstract) is headed, and so I’ve gravitated towards something I would equate to as mental exercise. Kinda like math i guess. You know, where your brows furrow, your eyes squint, and your head hurts? Yeah, that’s what realist painting is for me.
But it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Painting in this tradition is exercising my technical painting skills. See, when you paint something out of reference (a picture for example), you can see how far off you are. It’s measurable, like math; there is only one right answer. You either captured the image accurately or you didn’t. That is regardless of style or palette.
Both paintings are small. The city scene is only 5″ x 5″ and the crank is about 6″ x 8″. This is night to the day of my usual canvas size. I paint big, I paint freely with large strokes. These two realist paintings are all about getting in close, scrunching up, using really small brushes that can’t hold a lot of oil paint at one time. Needless to say, I am out of my comfort zone. And that is the whole point of it all.
Since creatively the river has temporarily run dry, I figured I would hone my skills while I wait for it to fill back up. With abstract painting, you only have a vague mirage to reference when deciding whether or not you nailed it. You have a distant vision, an idea, and maybe even a very concrete concept. But at least in my case, you very rarely have a crisp picture of the end point. And with that, there is plenty opportunity to get lost, to get diverted, to stop too short or push the painting too far, far beyond where you intended to go (and not necessarily in a good way). There is a lot of opportunity to beat a dead horse.
And that is why with Abstract painting you need to be really sharp with your technical abilities; you need to be spot on. You . When you’re trying to nail a good abstract painting, you don’t have any mile markers to measure the technical progress against. And it is the mastered ability of applying just the right amount of paint in a specific manner with an appropriate palette that will make or break an abstract piece.
Abstract Art is mostly about the concept or feeling (on the conscious level), that is the goal and the end point. And the means is tool-to-surface. When you’re painting you’re not 100% aware of the tool-to-surface component. Yeah, it’s happening, you are there and you control it. But a lot of that is going on under the surface, so to speak. It’s like driving to work: you are there, you are driving the car, and somehow you get from home to work. But if anyone were to ask you about a specific driving decision you made along the way, you probably couldn’t answer. It is important to have good driving skills under your belt so that when you have to make split-second decisions, you automatically make the right one, even without knowing it. It is this way with abstract painting.
And so, I am currently honing my skills waiting for them to be used for more exciting purposes, like an abstract painting.
