On Friday, I will display, for the first time, five new canvases that I have painted. These will be hanging in the place I work for an art and dessert event we are having that evening, and will remain up for a while afterwards.
I would call them paintings, but because I have had typically poor reception to my art (people say they like it, but don’t generally buy it until I mark it down to $20 or something), I am going to refer to them as painted canvases. I fully expect — in the grand tradition of artists who can’t afford to both buy new canvas all the time as well as find a place to store things that don’t sell — to paint over them in a few months. I’m not entirely upset with that thought. A good underpainting is nothing to laugh at.
Anyway, I call it the Color Series (I’m incredibly witty and original in titling things). It is, essentially, five colors (black, red, yellow, blue, and green) filling their respective 4′ x 2′ canvas in some monochromatic manner where the subject matter isn’t as important as the general overall color.
The main challenge was to avoid the idea that if I’m painting the red canvas, I can only have red paint on my palette. This would lead to the excruciating from-the-tube kinds of paintings that I find uninteresting. I needed to remember to use, for example, greens in my red to get a variety of dark, deep reds.
The trickiest of the five to paint was the yellow. I wanted there to be some kind of underlying subject matter, but yellow tended to bring to mind flowers and I just didn’t want another floral (the red had roses). Yellow made me think of sun and light, once flowers were removed from the list, and so I set about trying to capture that.
My favorite, though, is the blue. This is the painting you see in this post. It is an illustration of what it looked like when I went snorkeling in the Caribbean. The schools of fish swirling about, with large, shadowy fish beneath. The clear water did nothing to block the light and everything seemed large, up close, and iridescent.
I might not paint over the blue one. I might keep that one as is.
These are very beautiful paintings, Julie. I want all of them! I hope your event tonight goes well. Thoughts and prayers with you and for a patron of the arts to show up as well. I too love “blue” best, though “yellow” and “shadows” are close seconds.
I completely agree with Will, hoping and praying the event draws in a range of people. Each painting in the series evokes certain feelings, and in a way they (seem to me) are most powerful when displayed together–like the procession of the seasons, movements in a performance of music, or the spiritual/emotional/life journey of someone.
They are beautiful!
[...] a cynic at this point in life. In an email this morning, someone asked if I’d sold any of the paintings I’d been working on for several months for the [...]