Saturday, July 6, 2013

Texture Experiment

This is about 6-1/2" x 9" on watercolor paper prepared with a radical texture and pastel ground.

My plan on this one was that the heavy texture would preclude any kind of fussy mark-making. That it would force me to be looser and freer.

Wrong. I kept dabbing and stabbing at it and fooling around with it all day yesterday until it wailed STOP. A lesson I need to learn is how to s-t-o-p.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

If you were to have an exhibit, I'd encourage you to put this one in-- definitely. It tells a story of your process in the use of the medium, you term it as "it wailed stop", you voice frustration? disappointemt? with the plan gone off-course, as a viewer I say wow.

I'd put this one away and revisit it when you're not so close to the outcome.

Observe Closely said...

i was reminded of Da Vinci's famous quote "Art is never finished, only abandoned." Maybe there actually isn't a moment where a piece is finished. Maybe it's not possible to identify that spot in the process and acknowledge it. Maybe that spot in the process does not exist. Maybe what you do in practice is simply turn away.

cathye said...

i think that's accurate and people say that about poetry, too. the difference is with a poem when you revise you can still get back to the original, but not so with painting. you can overwork a poem, though, so much that you ruin it, anyway. even though you can get back to the original text, it's unworkable.