Layers

I was priming canvases yesterday. Some friends of ours were moving and had some old painted-on canvases they no longer wanted, so they wondered if I had use for them. Uh, free paint supports? Need you ask? So I came home from packing boxes and lugging furniture with a stack of pieces, anything from little 8x10's to a couple of big 30" hardboard squares. And yesterday, I primed them.

It felt a little strange, loading a great 4" brush full of white wall primer, and just shlopping it clear across someone else's painting. Sacrilegious, somehow. But, honestly, my friends didn't want the paintings any more; most of them were practise pieces, anyway. They didn't give them to me to hang on my wall, they gave them to me to do exactly what I was doing, paint over them. So I did. Three thick, goopy layers of white primer.

But one of the things about some of these paintings is that you can't obliterate them entirely. They're abstracts, painted very thickly in acrylics, and the bumps and ridges of the dried-on paint is still clearly visible under the white layer. So then I got to thinking: isn't that just like life? We might be able to slop whitewash over the original layers of our experience, but, depending on how prominent those layers were, they refuse to be hidden.

So then what do we do with them? Use them, that's what. Actually, I'm looking forward to putting my own ridgy thick sloppy abstracts on top of my friend's work. The bumps and ridges of her painting are going to make my own that much more interesting, and the finished piece will be something that, in a sense, we both created. Art with a history?

Life, the Universe, and Re-primed Canvases. It's all in the layers.

Ink People

Just for some visual silliness to go with the usual verbal kind, here's my latest painting. It's called "Very Small Ink People Playing in a Field of Colours", and it shows, well, very small ink people playing in a field of colours. Watercolours, to be precise. The whole thing is about 5x7", and was just splashed about this morning.

In case you're wondering, this is, of course, High Art. With a capital A. The kind you're supposed to study carefully, and then you nod wisely and make some erudite comments about composition and complementary colours. Not a lot of chiaroscuro to be had, I'm afraid; you'll have to find some other fancy words to throw around to impress the unwary. (Incidentally, I used to pronounce that word chiaro-scuro, thinking the o's were the ending of each part of the compound word, and feeling oh-so-clever for saying it that way; but then I learned that it's actually chiar-oscuro, clear-obscure. It means, of course, the light-dark contrast that people like Rembrandt do so fantastically well, and people like me can only dream of. But at least I can pronounce the word right, and now you can, too.) Oh, you could also draw some really intelligent inferences about the deep meanings of the ink people's poses, and how it reflects the inner state of my being at the moment of drawing them. And most likely it's also a scathing indictment of the social realities of twenty-first century life.

On the other hand, you could also look at this, and quietly chuckle at it, or briefly grin, or even just vaguely twitch up the corner of your mouth or left eyebrow. That would be quite sufficient for me, thank you very much.

Life, the universe, and ink people. I have a feeling there's more where those came from.