Anatomy of a Painting Idea

My friend Sid asked me the other day why I changed a painting that she had seen. And for some reason I had it on the brain and I think I was thinking about why I had changed it myself so I had a lot to say about it.

The old painting consisted of this face at the bottom of the large rectangular canvas with a trail winding up to the top of the canvas where there was a housing complex. The canvas was sityated on the easel in a vertical manner. (I'm setting the scene here, it's very dramatic, doncha think?)

Well, I didn't really like the painting for some reason (can't really say why) but I think it had to do with this face at the bottom which I found was less than satisfying. I think maybe he looked too specific or something, I like people to look a little more general. Also, I think I didn't like him because he wasn't a whole person. He was just a head.

And I didn't really like the housing complex either. I've found (because I've done a few housing complexes lately) that you really have to find the right note when doing a housing complex and that's difficult to do. People all the time think they can do an abstract painting (and they can) but it's still difficult to do a GOOD abstract painting, it has to have that ooomf which comes from who knows where if you find out please let me know. (Probably it comes from Canada or somplace, right under my nose.)

Anyway, I thought about doing some more people on the piece and started that but thought Naw that aint any good, so I flipped the painting 90 degrees so the canvas is going horizontal now and I sat and looked at it for awhile and then, out of the blue, I decided to paint a tuba player and an accordion player.

Now, I'm not sure why that subject matter came out when it did, but I have thought about doing something along those lines at one point and maybe I was tossing it around in some inaccessible brain I have for awhile and so maybe it isn't such a big surprise to some part of me.

It really does seem like I have two brains, one that handles talking and things like that, and one that handles writing. When it comes to painting, I think that I use the part that handles writing more than the talking side. I guess we're talking left brain and right brain, but somehow it seems different than that.

If I'm in the studio during a long day, the right brain starts to take over and I do all sorts of things that the next day, the left brain looks at in wonderment and says (because it can talk) THAT sucks!

I had thought enough about the tuba and the accordion that I had drawn a little sketch of something a few months ago and I knew eggs-actly where it was in an old sketchbook. I hunted through the studio and found the sketchbook and turned right to where the drawing was in the front of the book.

So, armed with the little sketch, I painted in a tuba player and an accordion player by mostly painting in the background around the shapes, which I've started to do more often, especially when I'm painting over something.

This is called painting the negative shapes (I think).

I have to say that I kind of recommend that kind of painting. For instance, instead of drawing and painting somebody's actual hand, you paint the space around the hand, and for some reason a lot of times you get something that looks way more like a hand than if you struggled to draw it. (Hands are tuff).

Continuing to paint negatively, I debated (Do it! No, Don't do it!) for awhile once I got the two people on the canvas if I should maybe just flip the canvas back vertical and just have the tuba player. The tuba player's image I really like, it shows the bell of the tuba but you can't see the person's head.

But I decided to go with the two people because I thought maybe a tuba player with no head would be a little too impersonal and I did like the image of the accordion player(female) who is looking off camera to the right, kind of checking out to see if the audience is enjoying the music.

There's something appealing to me about people in that situation where they really want you to like what they're doing. It shows, I think, a very good side of people.

The music aspect of it is there too, because I'm not sure if a tuba and an accordion combo is very common and I think it adds a little something to the whole thing. Some humor possibly but for all I know, tubas and accordions are very common duet mates. I mean, we saw trumpets and accordions all the time in Spain when we went, and cafe owners who would come out and shoo them away before they could really work a sweat up.

To finish it off, I added in a music stand for the tuba player (for compositional purposes) and filled in the background with a curtain (also for compositional purposes), as if they were on a stage for an audition or a recital.

It's funny, but a lot of the time I'll have ideas during the day or night that I come to the studio with planning on implementing them. But when I sit down in front of a blank canvas with say about four ideas to choose from, I suddenly start in on something completely different, like a tuba and an accordian.

Probably it IS something like my left brain has thought up all these things and is communicating to me while the right brain has ideas too that just aren't communicated until I sit down and pick up the brush...for some reason, I tend to go with the idea that comes out of the blue (or so it seems)...

Anyway, I left some of the old painting in the new painting, so the tuba has some red lines in it (from the remains of the houses of the old painting) and the accordion is green.

That may change and in fact the whole thing may change again, but that is....ANATOMY OF A PAINTING IDEA.