Life of an Onion

Shortly after returning from Dominican Republic I began another doodleism style painting inspired by the colours of the Caribbean sea and white sand. The painting 'Life of an Onion' ended up looking like a beach, if you squint your eyes (or stand back when viewing the original) it does kind of look like a beach. As I painted it, I was intentionally trying not to make the scene into anything (usually the dooleism style calls for some sort of object or landscape in the finished work). In that sense the work does not fit well with the 'Lab Book' series and so I did not call this a lab book painting, even though I used my lab notes for the drawings.

The composition of this painting contains several 'layers', by which I mean like layers of a cake that you see when you cut a slice. The layers each contain similar colours; the bottom layer containing pinkish sand, the layer just above with topaz greens, then a layer of deeper blues and finally a sky-cloud effect at the top. It was important to make sure that these layers were distinct from each other but at the same time integrated. As you can see from the work (click to zoom) the layers are not really distinct, but fit together like puzzle pieces. It is very important that the layers of the work overlap a bit, otherwise the composition becomes dull and distracting. Such compositional layers occur often in landscapes with the sky, or with roads and lawns at the bottom. Make sure that if you have a layer in your composition that there is some kind of connecting element that overlaps the other layers. For example, put a tree that begins at the bottom of the picture and ends by overlapping on the sky, and in this way the whole composition will tie nicely together.

22x30" cold press, 2009