Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Free Emotions

This where it starts to get serious.

After all my experimentation and dozens of studies my perseverance begins to pay off. It’s as though I have taken all that work into myself and now it is time for it to re-surface.
The previous painting was like a quiet starter to get the juices flowing and the hand moving. The middle ground is there waiting for me and I dive right in with this series of "free" abstracts:

Free Emotion #1, acrylics on paper, 61x45cm.
Vertical strokes of pure colour counterbalanced by horizontals. Lively and bright, happy and sunny.

A change of mood:

Free Emotion #2, acrylics on paper, 61x45cm.
Dark, foreboding, anxious, irritable, sad.

On a roll now:

Free Emotion #3, acrylics on paper, 61x45cm.
A mixture of cool blues and scarlet reds suggesting to me 'embarassment' - a flushed face (yes that's what I see!), and a cold sweat.

Another change of mood:

Free Emotion #4, acrylics on paper, 61x45cm.
I always love yellows combined with greys and blues, they appear to me to be very calm, serene even.
But what is this? Is that yet another face I see?
I am definitely beginning to see subliminal faces, not intentionally, but as Harry Nilsson sang, "You see what you wanna see, and hear what you wanna hear" [from "The Point"].

I can see I am going to have to give in to this directional prodding I am getting and start painting faces again!

Final painting in this series:

Free Emotion #5, acrylics on paper, 61x45cm.
This one took the longest and is much more multi-coloured. Perhaps mixed-emotions? This is my favourite of them all, and sure enough there is a face looking back at me. It's a jolly clowns face, but as is the way with clowns, there is also a sadness. Is that a tear I see?
I will call this painting "Tears of a Clown".

With the completion of this series I felt that I had achieved my aim and that these could stand for this project.

But I still wasn't finished yet. There is yet more to come. Tomorrow.

2 comments:

my croft said...

I've been away for a long time (and with good reason -- as you know) so I have a lot to catch up with. . . but I must say "extraordinary!" and "I may die of envy."

Acrylic seems to be your medium -- the paintings are alive and unfolding in way that the studies (yes I know they're studies) are not. The studies seem much more static to me. They're interesting because I don't yet see how one takes you to the other but, as I said I have a lot to catch up with.

I'll be curious to hear what your own assessments and reactions are when you get back from your holiday. Time away from a project, especially one so large and involving, can be fruitful.

bon voyage, mon ami.
Melanie

wv: logeni, a pocket-size versatility? I'm not expressing this well -- something like "the ability to do something quick, lively, and resourceful on short notice with limited means and much panache"

daviddrawsandpaints said...

What a joy for me to recieve your comments, Melanie, and very pleased to see you back surfing the cyberwaves.
You will see from the series of postings I will be making this coming week that while I did consider these present acrylics paintings to be good enough to stand for this project I still felt the need to go one step further. I enjoy very much working with acrylics and thank you for your appreciation for what I have done with them, but I enjoy using oils even more since I can manipulate them for longer and build up better textures (which I want to do even more of). I hope you will see what I mean when I post up my final series of paintings for this project. I am excited by them and I hope that "logeni" comes through for you to see :o)