Abstract Paintings and Musings on Art
I got a bit bolder with the colors in this painting. This was intended to be a continuation of the same visual idea from the painting I posted yesterday. The fact that it doesn’t quite seem to be is proof of something, but what exactly, I’m not sure. Another goofy composition, but I love it!
It may be hard to believe, but this little painting took about a week. It started out vertical, with less stuff, but even goofier than this, and it just took that long to resolve the composition to my liking.
Once I got it to this point, I was thrilled, and thought, “Oh, this is it! This will be my new signature style!”
Tune in tomorrow to see whether I was right or not. 😉
In this piece, I was aiming to create a painting with some nice space in it (and I do like the space here). Then it got goofy. I do like the way the wobbly stack of shapes in the lower left quadrant serves as a counterpoint to elegant cloud-like forms.
I haven’t posted in a while, but I have been painting. I have about 12 new paintings to share; here is the first of my new series of abstracts that I have been working on since July.
I began this one inspired by passion flowers (we have a huge vine of small passion flowers in our yard). I started this in acrylic, as my previous painting, “Food Forest,” was done in acrylic and I was so happy (eventually) with both the process and the end result.
With this one, however, I found working in acrylic as frustrating as is usually the case for me. So I repainted the whole thing in oil and then ended up painting out much of what had been part of the original composition. I finally abandoned the idea of a passionflower, and let the painting tell me what it wanted to be. And this is the result.
Kind of goofy, kind of beautiful, and I find myself loving the parts but wondering about the whole. This painting got juicier and juicier as I simplified, simplified, simplified.
This painting is available in my shop now: http://marilynfenn.com/shop/the-cosmos-made-conscious/
I started this painting last week, based on the sketch below. The sketch itself is based on a sculpture in tan canvas and black wire by one of my favorite sculptors, Lee Bontecou.
I haven’t really developed a set way to get started with the work I’ve been doing for the past 6 months. I usually have a period of getting very lost while developing my composition, and then have to paint my way out.
This time, I came up with some sketches to serve as the basis for the paintings’ compositions. (I have another one planned as well). Then, I give myself the freedom to allow other things to occur as I work. I may also try another, larger version of this, based on a more accurate interpretation of the sketch.
This is another sketch based on a sculpture by one of my favorite sculptors, Lee Bontecou.
This sketch is based on a sculpture in tan canvas and black wire by one of my favorite sculptors, Lee Bontecou.
“Woman Chained” – a gift from the muse…
I’m not used to having a complete idea for a painting when I start to work. And coming up with abstract compositions, for me, is still much more challenging than painting a representational work, where I just paint what I see. Working abstractly is usually much more a process of discovery of the image.
Not so with this, my latest painting, which was started and almost completed in about half-a-day one Sunday. It is kind of amazing to me that an abstract painting this size — 24″ x 24″ — could be done so quickly. Many of my paintings that are 1/4 or 1/8 the size of this tend to present much more of a struggle and can take days or weeks to create.
With this one, the basic idea came to me early one Sunday afternoon, and by late afternoon, I had filled out my concept for how the rest of it would go. Then it was just a matter of sketching the basic structure on canvas, and then painting it. I did spend a couple of nights making some adjustments to it, but still to me, this is speed painting! In some ways, painting this was similar to painting a representational work, as I already knew what went where, and then it was just a matter of doing it.
There’s a barbeque joint in downtown Austin called House Park Bar-B-Q whose motto is “Needs no teef to eat my beef.” This title is a play on that motto, and also refers back to my last painting. Hope you like!
I didn’t paint this to be about fracking, but I had just read an article about it, and the title seemed to fit this piece. I try to keep politics out of my paintings, but they seem to creep into my titles.
Or I could have called it something about “pressure.” Whatever.