It’s a rather beautiful Pantone colour that I had mixed and it cleverly does two very important things: firstly it breaks up the harshness of both the black and silver and, secondly, it carries the only real defined shape in the entire painting (by that I mean the loop and pointed part). In this painting the success comes down to just a few turns of a brush and that gorgeous light blue that’s doing its best to escape from the darkness. However, as an abstract, it can often be tricky to define focal points or the bits that allow you to form an opinion or a connection. There are many subtle details that reveal themselves in this painting as you spend a little time with it. More blending would have destroyed the boundaries that are so critically needed in the centre of the painting. It needed something final to be able to make a clear separation between the two. My idea was to contain that bubbling undercurrent of rich dark colours by introducing a band of silver with a defined edge, almost like a shoreline or the edge of a clifftop. I wanted the black and blue to form the main part of the painting with everything else playing a supporting role around it. My concept was a simple and straightforward one: black blended into blue then bands of silver, gold and white applied at an angle. With Climb a Little Higher that’s exactly what happened. So right in fact that you can feel it becoming something a bit tasty as each drop of paint is spread around and formed. However, it can also go spectacularly right. It doesn’t mater how careful I am in my preparation or how meticulous I am in choosing paints and application tools, it can all go wrong in a heartbeat. When I’m cutting canvas ready for painting I am always acutely aware that things can go wrong.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |