This is the third installment in a series discussing what’s happening with 36 mini-canvases I bought from Alabama Art Supply. I finished this set on Sunday night during the Cubs/Brewers game.
Most of these echo themes that I wanted to explore from the earlier sets. The peach/reddish foreground in the top left was the first one finished in this set. This technique is continued from the last set and involves dragging the black paint into the middle of the canvas and then overlaying it with a faux chinese character or stick figure. The primary reason this one is notable is the wavy line in it. I think it’s maybe a little like Superman.
The next will be the last “chinese character” painting. A little off-bluer than the other blue one. Very different in that I specifically didn’t want it to be obviously a stick figure look-alike. I don’t think it is. Or, at least, you have to strain a little to find it. Viewing this one along with the other three kind of plays that trick on your brain. I have an idea of what I think it looks like, but I won’t share because I don’t want to spoil your fun.
The next three were the bottom row, left-to-right in order. These echo the earlier painting where I used circles as a theme. I love the idea in the first one of a balloon getting away. Or a cell coming loose. Maybe it’s a representation of sometime around 18 hours before my conception.
The middle bottom looks, to me, like a highly themed/conceptualized version of the beginnings of a rainstorm. And – of course – I photographed it upside-down. Crap. So, just imagine it turned over, and, like I said, it’ll be like the highly themed/conceptualized version of the beginnings of a rainstorm.
Bottom right: Third rock from the Sun. Or, some other rock from some other sun. This was very fun to do. The texture of the sun spills over the edges of the canvas. And the moon is roughly the same color as the background, which means you might not notice it at first, so the blue planet just has a hunk out of it.
It’s hard to see in the picture (I need to learn to take better pictures of my paintings – HELP!), but the red stripe in the middle is highly-raised and highly-textured. It came first. I then took a bunch of other colors and dabbed the brush into the middle of the red stripe and dragged them out to both edges of the canvas. I like the interplay between these colors. Little bits of the canvas was left uncovered on purpose, if this technique didn’t cover it.