Tuesday, April 10, 2012

It's not painting if you're not using your left hand

This is for a 5 week painting for Color and the painted image. I've chosen to depict an interior nocturne, if you can call it that. I have a lot that I want to do with this image, specifically to do everything differently than I usually do. I've made drawing errors in one layer only to fix them in another and let the ghost of the " wrong" parts show through. Archival application of paint and traditional fat over lean rules will be discarded in favor of the final effect ( although I haven't gone too crazy yet). Most notably however, is so far I've only painted with my left, non dominant hand. It's always been an irrational fear of mine, to lose my right hand, and this painting is allowing me to see what can be done with - very - limited dexterity. I have to attack my canvas any way possible to get the right edges and value shapes, and it makes for a surprisingly beautiful surface. Here was an early state of the image:

And here it is with a glaze of burnt sienna over the entire thing and modeled more completely. I preferred the color scheme of the previous state, but I'm not keeping anything in this image sacred. I've always taken safe routes in painting by not harming anything that is currently working, but here i'm making a point to obliterate it. It's an exciting feeling when you've lost a part of the image that will never be exactly the same and all you can do is search for a better state.


I'm thinking of taking the laptop out completely.

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