I’ve continued to fiddle around with painting over the last week or so. I’ve more or less finished two more projects, so I though it might be time for a report. If you don’t feel like reading me rattle on about my thinking as a I worked on these projects, feel free to just look at the pictures and move on.

I had an idea after going to Tate Modern of trying to do something based on the idea of intersecting concentric circles. It was a nice idea graphically and it was a sort of interesting exercise in combining colors (especially since I had a hard time coming up with colors that I liked). As I kept working on it, I realized that I wasn’t enjoying it and eventually stopped. This kind of purely graphic thing is something that I can do in a cleaner and perhaps more striking way on the computer and it was hard to see exactly what I was accomplishing doing it in paint. And if the purpose was to experiment with paint mixing and color combinations, it would be a hell of a lot easier to do it with a square in a square (like Albers), rather than laboriously painting and repainting those rings. So I just put the whole thing down for a while, taking peeks at it as I would walk past. The the other day, it occurred to me that one way to make that project more interesting would be to stop being two-dimensional. So I added a three-dimensional part (actually half a ping-pong ball), so the photo you see is where it is at now. I’m not finished, but at least I’m interested in it again.

After I got sick of the circle painting, I decided to do something a little more representational. This was a little intimidating since I really don’t draw all that realistically and I’m particularly bad at hands and feet (although I’ve read that lots of artists have problems with those extremities). So, rather than trying to do a freehand design, I decided to try a painting loosely based on a photo I took of two strangers sitting on a couch at Tate Britain, completely absorbed in their electronic devices. As I went on, I decided it would be fun to have them sitting in front of and ignoring a large work of art, so I added a Miro (although I have no idea if it is actually that big). I can’t decide whether I’m done with it. I’ve reached the point where small additions could either improve it or make it significantly worse. I’m afraid trying to make the figures more realistic could backfire and simply highlight my primitive skill set. I think I’m at the less is more stage right now, and will let it sit for a while.