Neon Trail

So I took a year off from the blogging, mostly yo build up some new paintings to talk about (see the last post for one of the Mayan Riviera paintings). I did lot of the doodleism style in the last year, I am still trying to catch up on my lab note books which are full of doodles but I continue to make the doodles faster than I can convert them into finished pieces. To take a break from it though, I tried an original design for this one, it is not based on pre-existing drawings but done fresh from imagination as I sat at the paper. This strategy is more risky, you never know what comes out, but I kind of had this idea in mind of a caravan of abstract looking characters walking down a trail.

The other inspiration was the movie Avatar which we had just seen. In Avatar, there was this incredible scene where the characters were running through this neon forest, the objects were all luminous and their light was reflecting off other objects creating this eerie green glow. In the foreground I tried to capture that effect, each object has it's own neon light source that impacts on the surrounding ground. The rest of the characters are light from the sun-set sky, although they are mostly in shadow. I usually like to include multiple light sources in my paintings. There is no doubt that as an artist, you should think carefully about where the light is coming from and how it impacts the objects in your scene.

14x11" hot press paper. 2010.