What lies beneath

My art is changing. I feel drawn to human faces, human silhouettes, deconstructed and emerging from layers of paint and collage.

Yesterday, I started a trio of small paintings, with the intention of using a new process. I had no idea where I was going with this, so I let the intuitive composition lead me. I put down areas of light and dark, pieces of collage, then started defining the areas of interest.

That’s when things went south. I became stuck, trapped by precious details.  I didn’t really like what I was doing, so I stopped.

Looking at the work, I realized that I was using the wrong part of my brain. I was thinking about where I wanted to take things. As a result, the work lost the internal coherence it originally had. In my effort to “make a painting” I was trying to bring together the elements already there. I was trying to redeem parts of the work to solve the painting.

I stopped, and took a step back. Looking around my studio,I have many paintings that remain unfinished. Why? Not sure. Did the idea behind them fade away? Maybe. Now, every once in a while, I pick one up and decide what to do with it. Some parts disappear under layers of paint or collage, some get turned on their ear for a different perspective. Some get gessoed over, leaving traces of textures to be reinterpreted. Either way, I could see that finishing them would require radical decisions, since I was not in the same place as  I was when I began them. My perspective had changed.

Giving my current work a second look, I began to see a composition, somewhere in the stuff I didn’t like. I could see that I would need to be radical, to unblock, myself and the paintings.  I would have to work past the fear of losing what I had already done, to find what was really there.

I am not sure what this is about, but I feel it speaks to where I am at. Art is a reflection of life, and I am changing. I am learning that change doesn’t mean losing what I already had: knowledge, experience, wisdom. These will always be there, under the new surface, just a scratch away.

So it is with the paintings. In art as in life, I can to add new layers to what is already there, and reveal what lies beneath to form a foundation for all the new adventures.