I’m going to attempt to show some of the process of creation. Its pretty difficult inherently to show everything about how a single piece is made, all the things in the background that exist before the current image can be created – but I thought it would be nice to give an attempt at illustrating what I can. This started off as one post about my lavender imagery but even getting into explaining the background of it was turning into a hefty chunk of information so I decided to step back in this post and just illustrate the background choices that have gone into my current oil painting series
These are all little oil paintings that I’ve been working on. My first oil paintings. Decisions go into every element, after all, everything on the canvasses was put there by my own two hands. Nothing winds up there by happenstance. So why these things?
Artists are encouraged to create a solid body of work, identifiable as theirs. There are multiple reasons for this, ranging from the more creative notions of exploring concepts in solid ways by really focusing on the subject. There are also elements involved in communicating to an audience – its easier for audiences to understand an artists work when their works aren’t a confusing mish-mash of many seemingly unrelated elements. (The audience cannot see all the decisions that go into making any given piece, so its prudent to… make things clearer…) Related to the second point, its also a marketing thing. Artists with identifiable styles are…. easier to sell and easier to market. I’ve read that because of this younger artists are pushed earlier and earlier to identify their signature look.
How to do this? A number of ways: Creating many images in a series, works on a theme, intentional stylistic markers and other elements all go into this.
To this effect I decided that I wanted to have something like 10-15 paintings all with a very consistent theme.
Why this theme?
Well there are a few elements here. The florals/botanicals, the modern abstracted backgrounds, the less-modern-style of the foreground elements, the colour choices.
The colours are simple to explain. It was suggested I work with complementary colours by a fellow artist and I decided to go with it. I’m currently interested in the work of the impressionists and that also underpins some of my decisions with colour as odd as it may seem given impressionist colours are not nearly so saturated. The short of the influence there is that at the time the impressionists were on the relatively cutting edge of colour theory and especially colour theory as it applied to the arts. They used the scientific literature they had available to them, the most recent research that was able to filter out of strictly scientific circles and they put what they were reading and observing to the test.
On a related theme, the colour wheel often used in artist circles currently doesn’t reflect more modern understandings of colour, so this work explores the complementary colours in both the newer and older models. This background also suggests places my work could go in the future, building on coherent themes of impressionism and modern colour theory.
This puts the older fashioned foreground elements into a context as well. I’m aiming for and being inspired by the impressionists. (Though I’ve really hit on a style much closer to post impressionism.)
Oddly this influence also impacts the modern styled background! The move towards abstraction essentially came from the basis of what the impressionists were doing. Other important elements of art history can be traced to impressionist roots also, it was an interesting time for art. One of the elements that seems like a signature of the time was the tiled squares of colour. Using lots of little strokes of paint in different colours so that when you stood back and looked at the image as a whole the little elements would blend together to form a more coherent colour impression. Pointillism came from these roots.
As this was my first oil painting series and I wanted something that would allow me to explore the medium, the way the paint flowed, moved and felt I needed something simple to get my teeth into and decided tiled squares based on the tiling of colour of the impressionists – but larger – would be where I would start.
In my first oil painting session I created this, which went onto be the background for a piece of work:
I was rather pleased with this as background imagery for a painting and moved forward with this idea.
I think the last thing left to explain here is the choice of florals and botanicals, and thats fairly easy to explain I think. My primary medium is my beadwork. I focus on florals and botanicals in my beadwork practice, and part of building coherent bodies of work is to bring themes from older works into the newer works to create context, history and to build that personal signature. Florals have become part of this, for me. My real pride comes from my beaded floral pieces, with examples here:
Now these beaded works fall into another body of my work. So these beaded pieces have their own context and history, their own set of choices. With the beads all put into their places with my own two hands, everything has some reason. Much like the write up for the oil paintings I could attempt to explain the decisions going into these works. It would be a simpler write-up. These pieces were not as theory-rich, but at the same time it seems important to consider that each series, each body of work an artist produces, they all have their own context and history. The work I create in the future will be influenced by the work I’ve created in the past. The elements of this history, this study, my influences, the theories I’m reading and working on in my current oil paintings will come with me, much like the influences of my beadwork have migrated into my oil painting practice.
Each element builds onto the next, builds onto the next, builds onto the next.
For this reason it becomes very difficult to explain everything about the choices that go into creating any one given painting.
With this background though, next week I’ll attempt to do what I tried to do when I started writing this article: I’m going to try to explain from the beginning to the end the creation of one painting.
