Thursday, June 27, 2013

Perpetual Load Theory (The 2012 Question)


The 2010 solution finally has a question. Let me explain... in 2010 I painted "The 2010 Solution" ... a pivotal work that established a fusion between the Dali-like landscape style and Doodleism. That painting featured a funny looking monster sitting in desert smoking. In this work, a woman sits cross legged in a desert, though her health habits are much better since she doesn't smoke. In fact she doesn't even have arms to smoke if she wanted to. On the top left, a funny object on the horizon echo's Dali. I really like the camouflage sky creature at the top. Perpetual Load theory refers to the time in my life (2012) when these doodles were made... I was just over my first year being a professor and the work never seemed to end!

 Recently I have been thinking about how to make the pictures a little more 'classic' in their look. The old academic paintings, impressionism, and post impressionism all have a similar 'museum quality' to them. It seems to be based on plenty of value contrast- in other words light lights and dark darks... and saturated (bright) colours. Shaped are simple and compositions are unified. The sense of space is also clear, even in Dali, you can tell where the ground is, where the sky is etc. My work typically does not have the bright colours and value contrast,  namely because I use the old english method in watercolour, which does not use white or black paint. Watercolour also dries a little duller than oils. I also create a fragmented space... horizons don't align, there are multiple landscape perspectives, even different times of day are depicted in the same work. Anyways, I don't want to change my style just to look like the impressionists or whatever, but as an artist you should always be stretching yourself into non-comfort zones. I'll keep tweaking a little and see what happens.

22x30" cold press. June 2013

No comments:

Post a Comment