So, how did there come to be a new painting titled 'Evoking Autumn', seeming sufficiently satisfactory and successful in and of itself?
It was four months or more since the previous painting, also similarly preceded by a long gestation period apparently devoid of any suitable potential ideas. While in a larger sense creative potential may be infinite, somewhat paradoxically not just anything will do.
I could improvise abstractly or in a mode where it's possible for 'anything goes' to perhaps resolve into something significant. There is always an abundance of profoundly sensitive and infinitely diverse abstract art in the world being created continuously and much that i appreciate.
Yet i mostly tend to make images related to what can be easily identified so as to be entered into, having an aptitude for evoking form, spatial distance, and light, and abstract qualities are concentrated in colour, tone, organic patterning and subtle attention to integrated brush-work.
Not knowing what to express can be very challenging, more so than it used to be perhaps. Especially in the absence of a social role or other significant mode of activity. When i have something i'm motivated to work on, immersion in the spontaneous use of a brush is a familiar mode i naturally enter into.
It's not a hobby and i've never regarded it as such and so have never had a use for that word.
Likewise i'm not an amateur artist neither am i professional these are just categories i don't relate to as i've simply continued what comes naturally ever since i could hold a pencil or a brush and the category most related with that is probably human.
There are criteria, admittedly of my own choosing, relating to the intrinsic significance distinguishing a conception from a cliche and determine if it's a suitable structure for feeling and the feeling is in the flavour and the elements of form and colour and the characteristic touch of brush to canvas
So having waited long in not knowing when or even if for the right moment which always turns out to be now. Going ahead with loose pencil lines mapping out and adapting image to fit. Minimal crayon touches to indicate colour, darkest areas filled methodically with black paint and diluted linear washes of same to fortify contours. Using one bold and pointed brush throughout wielded delicately and wand-like in my most meditative element one with the process.
Wanted it to last longer so as to have that activity to focus on which was unfolding very smoothly and contemplatively quiet. Yet still came to completion in five or six sessions of afternoon and evening. Continuing till long after midnight by electric light at a table by a flickering fire and dark chocolate whereas two years previous i would have been smoking
instead.
Anyway, this is no 'how to' lesson, just a desire to share beauty with some depth, and harmony in a world of harm and money. There are no superficial tricks or techniques other than what you are free to invent or discover or otherwise stumble upon, and who am i to tell anyone or anything how to be uniquely herself, himself, or itself?
Besides, on a beautifully abundant but barbarically backward planet microcosmically one-with boundless vastness of unknown infinity (aren't we all?) with its insanely orchestrated wars, cultures of corruption and commerce, artworks are sold for prices in hundreds of millions while simultaneous millions are being rendered homeless, stateless, hopeless without food and water and those who've lost the plot literally call the shots and we wish it would all get better overnight while some get rich and famous for predicting it will.
So by contrast as a healing counterbalance and with the best of intentions attentively managing to manifest an actual artifact of unstained intrinsic benevolence integrating random traces and touches of refinement accumulating to a density of richness visually equivalent to an illuminated vision of good news shared freely, and call it 'Evoking Autumn'. ~
~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~
Martin Rainbowmaker
(Appreciative comments welcome. Click on title heading.)
