It looks like not much has changed since the last post. Besides the clouds, I also worked on the leafless trees. The painting still has the clarity of light that I was afraid to lose. I love it, but I’m tired of thinking about whether there is anything else to do. I’m getting it out of the studio… at least for a while.
After finishing “Rooftop Dancers,” I wanted to continue with another large, figurative painting. I had an old canvas that was the size I wanted. It was a piece that had been sitting unfinished in the basement for several years. I was going to take the canvas off the frame and re-stretch it, but I couldn’t quite do it. I had to give to painting another chance.
I started the piece in winter from a photograph and a smaller version of the same scene. I was a bit stuck and was having a hard time with color, so I painted the whole painting with white paint, bringing out the image solely through texture. The plan was to bring in delicate, translusent color glazes, but I have no experience with glazing and it didn’t work out the way I had hoped. I wished that I had left it white, because it was quite nice at that stage.
I decide to go back into it and just paint leaving the underlying texture as I could but not worrying too much about preserving it. I took this photograph after playing around with the sky and a few other areas. I am also including a close-up to show texture.
The smaller version of the scene was published last summer in Shambala Sun Magazine.
The female figure was stiffer than I had wanted. The overall image held together but compared to the initial sketch the woman in the painting had very little flow or movement. I felt some resistance to changing something that was working, but I knew I wanted to express something different. I had no choice but to take the plunge.
A number of unsatisfactory manifestations of the female dancer took shape, each one less appealing than the last. I became frustrated and a bit anxious; my saving grace was that I stayed loose throughout the process and was willing to continue to wipe away and repaint until I arrived at what I was envisioning. I continued to work with Photoshop to deepen my feeling for the changes I was about to make on the canvas. There is still a lot of work to do, but am happy that the figures are finally close to the way I want them. This strengthens my confidence in this way of working.
Art is about taking risks, right? Of course it is, but there’s no need to be macho about it. There are times when you feel confident and want to dive right in, to take your painting forward or make drastic changes, and that’s exactly what you need to do. Other times you might be less sure of where you want to go. It is easy to just stop there, do nothing, and loose momentum. Or you could develop a “risk management strategy”. This could be a way of working on the painting without actually working on the painting (if you know what I mean). In previous posts I discussed pausing work on the large canvas, and creating smaller versions in different mediums (the watercolor and the monochrome acrylic). Here is the techie version of that process.
I photographed the painting, opened it in Photoshop and proceeded to sketch in changes on my Bamboo drawing tablet. I added layers on top of the original layer so that I could draw and erase without affecting the painting itself. The “Clone Stamp Tool” was handy to cover over the old arms so that I could paint them from scratch.
Tom Hopkins, an accomplished, Canadian painter who recently passed away, demonstrates similar ways of working. In a video, he cuts out one of his figures, evlarges it and moves it around the painting to see how it would look in different places. It was just to get ideas for how he wanted to continue the painting. “It’s kind of like cheating in a way,” he said, “and whenever you feel but if you think you’re cheating as an artist, you’re probably on the right track.”
