I suddenly am craving working on paper. Not in the doodling in a sketchbook kind of way. Something more ambitious. I'm always more experimental with paper and mixed media as this image shows. Though part of it might be that I'm not trying to be ambitious when I do stuff like this. Though generally stuff like this comes out when I'm working through some sort of stress. I tend to not produce it except under the right circumstances since it is more art therapy than anything else. It's more personal and expressive, and feels much more primitive I guess. Maybe I mean instinctual. Like the art equivalent of sucking my thumb. When I'm in a good mood and I try to reproduce this sort of thing I usually come up with nothing. This piece was done at a time when I was particularly stressed about a money situation, so stressed that I had a bad stomach ache for a month. Eventually I dealt with the situation and the stomachache and these pieces about ulcers went way.
But there is something freeing about making stuff like this. Generally I am no good at expressionist or abstract or non-observational art. I am mostly inspired by things I see. If that's taken away, then I'm just swirling colors around like a kid and I have a hard time figuring out where to put the blue and the green and the red and what it will all add up to in the end. I need to have a concept or idea, which I generally always get from things I see around me. Drawings like the one above come from out of my head which I am more suspicious of. I don't know if they hold up well and they usually seem kind of trivial. And then there's the fact that I don't produce them consistently. Maybe if I did more stuff like this they would develop and grow. In school I would do things like this and art professors would always push me away from it, as if it wasn't worth my time. I suppose it is insecure territory. But still there are moments where it is incredibly satisfying to do stuff like this.
Perhaps it is because of the rigid painting schedule I have been in the last couple of months. But I want to make messy pictures of nothing on paper.
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