Automatic Emotion

While there was great energy in the work I posted yesterday I felt as though it was too uncontrolled and haphazard, and in any case, far too Joan Mitchell. I love Joan's painting but she has been there before me and I need to find my own means of expressing these elusive feelings.

A new day, a fresh start.

With a calm mind and a clean sheet of paper I draw a series of free lines "automatically" which wander around the page creating a 'diagram' of how I am at that moment in time - quiet, open to suggestion, determined. Choosing generally sombre colours I paint the shapes intuitively:

Automatic Emotion, acrylics on paper, 59x42cm.

I was very pleased with this at the time, however, for me it is too much like "painting-by-numbers" and also it reminds me of paintings by Serge Poliakov or Kasamir Malevich. Again not such a bad thing but this is not how I want to paint. There has to be a middle ground between this highly formal and considered manner and the wild exuberances of the previous "free" paintings.

And that is where I go next.

Oh, yes, and I know you'll think me mad, but you can see this painting as facial can't you?