I didn’t paint much at all for about a week after finishing The Road Less Travelled. Well, that’s not entirely true. I did paint something. I had an “idea”. A concept. And it was a mess. While my SDO project was absolutely something I did from an idea, and I’m really quite pleased with how it turned out, I’m generally pretty terrible at conceptual painting.
I decided a break was important and since I was playing a gig with Kim and we had a bunch of things to do, I didn’t touch paint for a week.
Last Sunday, I built a couple of canvases. I made a 60×60 inch canvas which at this point I’m planning on doing another SDO related piece, but I decided that since my last planned piece hadn’t worked, I would do another “colour & form” piece, just on a larger scale.
Monday morning I came up with this:
Random pencil lines and the idea was that it would just be a larger Playing on a Saturday style piece.
Tuesday saw some more colour and I continued on Wednesday to add colour, still thinking colour & form.
Then as I looked at these photos, I realized I was painting figures. Hmm. Then Kim said “hey, you’re painting figures” and then a follower of mine D. tweeted “I love it. Looks like two people kissing passionately.”
Hmmm. That’s very interesting.
So then I spent 2 days worrying about screwing things up because I know I’m painting a thing, a concept, again.
Today, I made some changes to work within that concept.
I think it’ll be OK. I don’t really know where this will end up. I think I now have a bit of an understanding of what an author means when they say their characters are telling them what to do.
The paint is telling me what to do. But I don’t know the ending of the story. It’s kind of exciting.
UPDATE: See the finished canvas on The Journey Ended in a Kiss.