I have been an artist for about 15 years, working almost in oils and charcoal with occasional forays into encaustics (painting with pigmented, molten wax). In the past few years, I''ve been making representational paintings of the things I see around me. This has gone well enough but I kept coming back to my first love which is the human figure and, by extension, animal figures. My interest in those is mainly body language and gesture as well as beauty of form. But literalness in figure work got in the way. I wanted to use figures to create something emotional and evocative. To that end, I tried to make my figures more abstract. I was struggled with that for a long time but could not find a satisfactory way into abstraction until I took an online course called "Abstracting the Figure" from Melinda Cootsona. That course opened the door for me and my work took a definite turn. Now I''m really playing with paint, ideas emerge easily and each painting gives me more ideas for another. This blog is my journey into a new art realm.
I had painted this pose once or twice before but was never happy with the result until I started with an old painting that I turned upside down and painted over, allowing quite a bit of the original painting to show through. Working back and forth, scraping out and adding in, the original painting provided so many wonderful visual ideas that I could meld with the figure I was painting. I paint mostly with a palette knife, so the original painting also provided quite a bit of texture and that makes it possible for layers of color to emerge through each other. Below is a slide show of the stages the painting went through. This became my first "way in" to abstraction. I titled it Food for Thought, partly because the figure looks thoughtful but mostly because, for me, it was literally food for thought, and I found it nourishing.
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