An Unexpected Painting: Feelings Bottles

My painting of bottles that I used in Monday Motivator “Snailed It” ended a long way from its starting point. It began in a workshop by the fabulous Elijah Louis Smith titled “Drawing is Fun”.

Elijah created a still life setup with an assortment of items including fresh flowers, a fake plantpot, small bust (sculpture of a head), patterned fabric, one wine bottle, and other things I don’t remember other than there was quite a selection. We drew with a variety of mediums and tools, including unlikely things to encourage experimentation. Seeing what happens instead of knowing the outcome, and layering on the same piece rather than being precious about what’s been done.

Coloured pencil was the starting point, but you’ll be hard pressed to see it in my final piece. Once inks and fluid paint were added to the table, I headed that way with two pieces, one of paper and the other on board. Elijah started moving the elements of the still life around, encouraging us to keep adding to our pieces.

At a certain point the shape of the bottle caught my attention, though I couldn’t say why. I started painting this repeatedly, always upright, then putting my two pieces right-sides together to transfer still-wet paint from one to another. Also using a brush handle to draw invisible lines on the back of the paper to encourage the transfer of paint (a monoprinting technique). Getting lost in playing with materials and responding to what was happening on impulse.

When time was up, this is what my pieces looked like:

Back home, I decided to see if I could reinforce the bottle shapes, make things a bit more definite so it’s less of a colourful chaos. Using transparent colours so I wouldn’t block what was there. Purple in the background because I know this creates an interesting dark.

At a certain point my brain ran to the thought of bottling up ones feelings, possibly because I had been missing being able to tell Alistair about the afternoon. And if there were seven bottles then I could have one for each day of the week in which to put feelings aside.

Then my brain ran to the alphabet stamps bought when we were still on Skye, because preserves should be labelled. I knew where they were (unlike many other things since moving) because that drawer unit had been shifted with the contents in it (easily done because of the castors Alistair had added so I could move it around the studio). I had never used them until this month; literally years of them waiting for the right moment.

The words top right are: “Feelings Bottles”, and on the bottles “Monday, Today, Day (positioned as if the rest is hidden by the angle of the bottle), Friday, Sunday”. I avoided the longer days of the week (Wednesday, Saturday) because I wasn’t sure they’d fit in the space.

I like this endpoint, the layered colours and textures, but it was a surprise to me.

I haven’t done anything to the other piece, yet.

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