Preventing the Deterioration of an Otherwise Normal Scene

By 2009 the doodleism style had evolved into a landscape fusion, a kind of surrealism meets cubism. Surrealism is the style made popular by Dali, with melting clocks, long legged elephants, and humanoid rock formations, while cubism is defined by Picasso and his twisted lines and shapes that vaguely resembled everyday objects. I am not trying to place myself with those artists, just trying to describe what this style turned into. Parts of it are seemingly familiar like stars in the sky, a beat up car, a growing flower, but your eyes do not rest for long on any given object. My goal was to pack as many doodles into one picture while maintaining some sense of it being a finished painting. Objects seem to disintegrate into space, while organic beings try to keep it all grounded, hence the fanciful title.

Painting stars like this was a big challenge considering I eschewed any white paint or masking fluid. I knew how to do the effect already after many other paintings with stars in space, Sun Earth Moon was perhaps the first one. I started with a red under painting using fairly strong wash of alizarin crimson (red), leaving the star shapes in blank paper, and keeping some areas without the wash. Then I repeated with a viridian hue (green) wash, following the basic shape of the sky but leaving the blank paper stars mostly opened, while covering a few here or there with the green. I also left some green spots open where the red wash is present. Finally a french ultramarine wash similar to the others, leaving the spots open where I want stars. There is no more painting to do. The result from these three washes area a mix of white, red, blue, and green starts on a near black background. The white stars are rimmed with chunks of red, green and blue giving them a shimmer. The effect is profound when seen in real life, the scan does it justice though.

22 x 30" cold press, watercolour, 2009