A full day of painting yesterday, a painting planned in August 2016, drawn out in May 2017, painted a year later and yesterday glazed, so taking 5 years in total. This is partly because I was unsure about the painting at every stage. Here is the idea sketch:
I made models for the objects and drew it out, close to the original idea.
I took that photo at the end of the underpainting day and I thought it looked a little simple and empty, so decided to echo the hole in the figure on the left to the sky on the right, making this something like the eye of a skull. The duplication of forms is the essence of my symphonic style, which I first started with The Migraine Tree those years ago.
The aim of the repetition is, as in music, to add structure and a factor of anticipation and information expected or thwarted. It is also a reminder that visual art is a temporal medium, we look at different parts of an image in a different order, so telling a story, yet, unlike most stories we can hold it all in our view and minds in one instant. Perhaps it is this mix of the instant and temporal that makes visual art such a great artform. We can observe it multi-dimensionally, with time or without time. We can engage or not engage to any degree.
There it lay for nearly two years. Then, yesterday decided to complete it, adding more colour that perhaps I would have two years ago. The stormy sky on the right is red and green (the photo barely shows this). Unlike many of my painting ideas, this didn't have a title. The working title was 21st Century Socialite, a critique of moble phone use, but it felt negative, and I was amazed how different titles change the perception of an artwork. 'Love and Wifi' tells a whole story of romance here. Now, in these Covid-19 times, I could call it Social Distancing! But really, it's a sad painting, not critical, not about Covid lockdowns, but yes it is, of course, romantic.
It was a full day of painting, but in other news, a new camera has arrived, a Canon EOS 250D, and I spent the hours from 10pm to midnight reading the manual. My old camera is 8 years old and I thought that I needed an upgrade. So far the quality doesn't seem that much higher (I have barely tested it). Of course the picture resolution is higher, but sometimes this can be a numbers race. More megapixels doesn't mean better if the result is just as grainy (shrinking the image reduces the grain, of course). There are lots of new features, like auto-cleaning, noise removal AI etc. but the biggest instant change is much better video support, it can record in 4K and many sizes at different speeds, and with an external mic - before I only had 720p and the internal mic. My old one has served me well, recording all of the two years of ArtSwarm episodes and about 200 videos for YouTube, as well as detailed art photography of my paintings and subjects. A good camera is, today, an essential part of being a visual artist.
