Thursday, December 03, 2009

Grey Power

Painting today, the main study for a painting called "Abandoning Someone Who Was A Friend To Me When I Had None".

The colours are unusual. I began to wonder how to represent abandonment and had been toying with the idea of using grey to represent time in a painting. That came about because of my studies of neuro-linguistic programming early this year. In that, mental images to be enhanced should be imagined brightly coloured, clear and vivid, while images to be destroyed should be fuzzy and grey.

That made me think of an unusual property of paintings; that most have constant levels of chromanance. Paintings can be brightly coloured (like a Monet, van Gogh, or a Raphael), or subtly coloured in ashen greys (like a Hammershoi), but the overall chromanance tends to remain constant. I decided to colour part of the image in grey, and as you can see the result was powerful. Mentally speaking grey is a killer colour, it kills just about everything it touches! And here that tiny distant figure near the mountains at the end of that long grey road is dead, about as abandoned as anything can be.

This picture is about 25cm square and the full size one will be about 80cm square. Studies like this are very useful for working things out, and it only took one day. The picture cries out for blue and I'm unsure of the green back-reflections. More to do, tick tick.