This piece was inspired by my desire to explore different textures. Prior to putting any paint on this piece I glued down some wrapping tissue paper to create a wrinkled texture. Then I just began putting paint down, I poured out a few colors and went to town with no real rhyme or reason behind it. I ended up thinking this was the most disgusting looking painting and left it like it is in the photo above for a few months before picking it back up again.
It wasn’t until I finished a small study, Jealousy is Black, that I figured out the right next move for this painting. I had struggled a lot with what to do with the study and eventually ended up painting black over the entire thing just to see what would happen… and I LOVED it! Looking back on the process of that piece I realized I actually started and ended that piece with the color black which is not typical for my process but I think I was desperate to make that piece work I was willing to try anything!
I ended up adding some copper leaf on the lower half of this piece and then I decided that I should give the black a try here as well. It looked much better but it still wasn’t entirely finished. It was the necessary amount of toning down of the craziness that was happening to make the painting work.
The biggest difference between these two phases is that I ended up painting over much of the copper leaf as well as adding some slightly grayed down violets in some of the darker areas. At this point the piece feels SO much better than it did when it was a big colorful mess and once again I was reminded of the importance of doing small studies to work out problems you might face when attacking a larger canvas.
I included this just for fun! 🙂