Painting: Then Things Got a Little Weird

This is a story about a pair of scissors, a couple of hours, and a painting. But let me start at the ending: a painting that I find intriguing and pleasing, but is a bit unexpected and weird (for me).

This is what it had looked like a couple of hours earlier, when I downed brushes and let it dry:

On some other day I might have been satisfied with this result, but on this day I wasn’t. It felt either overworked (should have stopped earlier) or underworked (still needed something but what?). I left it to dry on my studio table, hoping a kitty wouldn’t walk over it (they didn’t).

I’d started the painting with a drawing of the flowers done in black fineliner.

Then added some collage using nori paste (a starch-based, water-reversible glue; you can cook it up yourself but the version you can buy has a preservative in it).

Then watercolour (ready-mixed in old ink bottles and from my pans box), acrylic ink, Inktense pencil (giving different marks as it hit wet or dry areas as you can see in the detail photo).

I did make a video of my painting it (speeded up 10x), but the quality isn’t great. It was the first I have done with this camera, and I have since figured out how to switch off auto adjustment settings, but BEWARE there’s flickering of light/shadows and the focus shifts at times.

When I was editing the video I saw several points at which I should have, could have, might have stopped. (At 0:36 or 1:00 or 1:15 or 1:42.) But I didn’t.*

I went back to look at the painting after a couple of hours, when I thought it was probably fully dried. I was still irked by it, and decided to see if I could crop out some ‘good’ bits. The first bit I cut off was the right-hand section, which is about a third. This led to the impulse to cut off the left-hand section, then cut left-over middle into four and rearrange these bits. I suddenly liked it a whole lot more as it’s intriguing, needs a bit of figuring out. A bit weird, for me.

I shared a photo with a few people, and got responses ranging from “This is pretty amazing it makes you want to peak under the edges to see what is under there” to “It’s like vertical panes of cubism, as if seen through prisms as I walk past” to “Looks like pre-migraine visual disturbances” from my Ma. I suspect the in-house art critic would have agreed with her.

I’ve now glued the pieces onto some wet-strength tissue paper (thin but strong) and put it up on the wall for pondering. One thing I’m already wondering is whether I should’ve used a ruler and knife to cut it into straight lines or whether my freehand scissor cuts (read: skew) add an organic feel.

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