The Evolution of a Painting
Sometimes a painting can take so long that I imagine it'll never reach the end! This one was made during some challenging personal times and maybe that's one of the reasons it took me so long to finish. The strange thing is, that throughout the making of it I kept on thinking of the word 'peachy' and although I felt far from peachy, I decided it would make a nice title for it so I've decided to call it 'Feeling Peachy'!
Here's what it looked like at the very beginning, acombination of collage papers and acrylic paint. I fell in love with that beautiful patch of orange quite quickly and my feelings didn't change as you will see!
I painted the sky mauve and the beginnings of buildings and trees were appearing.
Here's a close-up showing the house I painted, a stage further than the last picture, it looked like it was here to stay but providence had other ideas!
I paint intuitively and therefore have no plan of the subject matter or what colours will dominate. I make layer upon layer of shapes and drawing until I feel there's a harmony throughout the picture.
The imagery reveals itself to me as I'm working. I love the layering effect because I feel it gives so much depth and mystery to the painting. This can take a long time but it's a way of working that can occasionally happen quickly or like this painting, can take an age!
And so it had to be. The big house had to go and in its place seemed to be a smaller green one. At this stage I was trying to convince myself the painting was finished but I kept getting niggling feelings about the way the little green house overlapped the lighter house on the right hand side. I wasn't comfortable with it.
So I changed it...
I also removed the row of green flowers that were on the left hand side and added more detail to the patch of green next to my sacred patch of orange. ;)
I'm very happy with the outcome, it always amazes me that throughout the process a painting can look to me such a mess a lot of the time and then things begin to click into place until finally everything is as it should be.
And that's the reason we do it isn't it? :)
I'm not going to be offering this painting for sale yet because it's going to be part of an exhibition I'm having with another artist in Devon. More about that in a future post. Please click here for more details.
If you find that you quite like this painting and would like to have it as a beautifully framed print or a tote bag or a rug (yes a rug!) or something else, I've listed it for you in my Society6 shop. Do pop over and have a browse, there's loads to see!
So I'll leave you with a few examples below and say a big thankyou for coming here today and for reading down the post to get this far. :) I've been quite ill this week but I'm slowly recovering. It's nice to have reached the weekend and have time to relax a bit isn't it? I hope you have a lovely weekend and enjoy looking at my new designs. xx
♥
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