Paint pushes back - 2024 03 30

 

Graphite, pencil crayon, acrylic paint on mylar 6" x 6"

My great enjoyment with drawing and painting is the surprise I feel when I step back and see what happened at the end of a session at my art desk. 

Every time I pick up a pencil, a pen, a brush or a scraper feels like the first time. Every time I touch the surface with my mark making implement I must let go of assumptions, expectations, and perfection. I feel the energy of this mysterious creative drive to flow through me, I suspend my anxious need for control long enough to let the mark make itself.

I use layers to build the image, a subject on a ground. With each layer I pretend it is the first layer strive to bring a kind of truth to each pass across the image. 

The materials I use reflect the circumstances of my production. These are materials that can be used on a small art desk tucked away in the 'living room' of my basement suite and also, I have created my auxilliary desk up in the attic. I can't make a mess, no splashing, no buckets, no drips.

The tools I use reflect my inability to get a brush properly clean after I use acrylic paint. I am tired of losing perfectly good brushes to my poor brush washing, coming back to work on a painting and finding the brushes have turned into a hardened, thick spatula. Typically, this is because my time has run out at my art desk and I need to do a quick, perfunctory clean up to get on to other things.

The reason I love graphite and pencil crayons, also water-based inks, is the minimal clean up required after I am done. 

My latest investigation is to use clay modelling tools to push the paint around. They are rubber-tipped and easy to clean after I get paint on them. They are also not expensive, so they are not precious. With these tools I am experimenting with applying the paint and then quickly scraping it off before it dries on the areas that I want to leave exposed.

I am an impatient artist. I marvel at the amazing detail and skill of my extremely talented friends. I accept the way I do things. It gives me great satisfaction to contemplate my efforts and think about my next experiment.

I often don't know exactly what is going on below the surface of my efforts to appear 'normal' and 'functional' in the world. I love the surprise of finding out what is revealed when the paint pushes back.

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