Brushstrokes

Looking at my 4 year old the other day carefully placing identical blobs of color onto a piece of paper, (due to his under developed fine motor skills of course), I began to wonder whether this is the right way to go in order to achieve balance in a painting. That is should I carefully continue with a chosen direction and method of applying a stroke, a la Van Gogh or the Pointillists, as opposed to acting on impulse and taking cues from hand movements? If you simply follow your instincts, then the piece shows intensity but also chaos and instability. If all brushstrokes flow simultaneously, then there's serenity and the eye is calmer when it moves around the work. Question is what do you want to achieve, and is this result what you'd be happy with for the moment, or is it good enough to live with for a lifetime?

Texture

So I've decided to revisit texture via a combination of oil and wax. It is incredible how different the painting process feels with this quick change of course. The paint all of a sudden has mass and feels like a true substance with lots of volume. The colors blend in but keep their original intensity and peek through without layering. Most importantly, the expressive nature of the painting becomes that much more immediate. A palette knife allows the inner urge to spill out emotions to come through so much more readily than a paint brush. It feels as if once you know that paint cannot be smoothed out, you relax and simly let it breathe. The canvas underneath has its say as well as it doesn't need to be covered up but rather acts as another element in a carved out piece. It's truly a marriage made in heaven me painting this way. I feel that it will very soon lead to the long awaited abstract effect that I've been seeking.

I've got the color but how do I approach form?

It's clear that in any successful painting the two elements, form and color, happily entertwine. It can be seen in a completely representational work and to the same extent in an abstract piece. However, it becomes much harder to analyze and accomplish a successful combination in a painting that is void of any representational references. There are of course multiple schools of abstract painting, from geometrical or minimalist abstraction to expressionist, to color field. Automated references drawn from imagination were employed by the surrealists. I, however, believe I'm not able to part with the connection to nature and its forms. Nor do I really want to as it truly provides the most varied choices and organic combinations. My idols like Kandinsky and 20th century Monet, for instance, successfully bridged abstraction and figuration by drawing inspiration from landscapes. However, the tricky part is determining which key elements in a painting get to stay when it's reduced to an abstract piece, and which are less important to the overall composition and feel.

Color intensity & setting limits

When given a full range of color you inevitably want to use whatever is available and yet that's what creates unsettlement, confusion and lack of focus in a work. Masterworks show, even Monet's more abstract late landscapes, that the most powerful relationships are of key two or three colors. The rest are minor accents. However, it's the limitation and the choice of those most powerful relationships that poses the most difficult question in a painting. Somehow, just utilizing two or three colors isn't enough. The accents are just as important, even though there're less of them. So really it's this play of intensity that is key. It's the constant control over composition, quantity and power of pigment that is at play.

Expectations

I always wonder what happens to an artist's genius once he/she is recognized, pinned down to a style, and is forced to create within it for years and years or prosperous recognition. Does the drive to create overpower the boredom of style? Or can one always find challenges even when the themes are seemingly trite and overused? Or when a commission is ordered - how much of it should be dictated by a client vs. the artist's own freedom to end the piece when it has nothing more to say? I feel like the hardest thing sometimes is staying true to self and not simply appeasing the masses.  It is so easy to ruin the piece by overworking it, or to suddenly realize that you have nothing more to add but are expected to achieve so much more. Of if a style simply isn't yours and what you truly wish to do gets sidelined by what what pays the bills. It isn't easy to find your voice with so many other voices asking you to compromise. I guess a sign of a true genius is the ability to stand his ground despite criticism and expectations.

The fascination with Cezanne

Honestly, I don't get it. His figures are abominable. His landscape palette is very boring and bland. Probably the only thing that I actually enjoy are his apples. Truly, either I'm missing the point or the whole art world has gone mad. Yes, he broke down the landscape into sections or cubes, but didn't Monet do a much better job with breaking it down into color fields? Maybe it's just my own sensibility to color that is preventing me from appreciating his contribution in terms of line. But then I value Picasso's jagged line and Dali's careful draftsmanship and find Cezanne simply primitive and secondary.

Color relationships

The other day a good friend and collector was telling me about a show he saw at MOMA in New York by an artist who worked on 20 landscapes at a time with one color. He seemed baffled by the complexity of the idea of placing a color so boldly without the rest of the painting figured out. To me, it seems like a completely opposite phenomenon and an excellent exercize. Our whole world of perception is about our reading of color relationships. It makes it that much easier to start from an abstract color field and play with how another color will effect its impact. Yes, the idea might be daunting if one doesn't feel his/her palette. However, an artist overtime comes to undesrtand his inner color wheel and should be able to apply it in either an abstract or representational format.