Painting Over Safe

The first thing I noticed when I walked back into the studio last night, and again this morning, was that yesterday’s painting on the canvas looked very safe compared to the three previous versions of the pose. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, it just looked safe.

I’ve been trying to get myself painting on canvases more, not least because I have somehow collected quite a number of blanks ones. I’m at the number where I don’t feel I have to be precious about them, and I’m trying to repeat the mantra “paint on canvas like I paint in a sketchbook”, to encourage loosening up.

Yesterday I got this figure onto the canvas, and I enjoyed the painting and was pleased with the session, but when I came back to look at it, I could see that I had gotten safe. It didn’t look like me. I don’t mean the model looks like me, I mean the painting.

This is what I am looking for in my practise, this is why I have been making all these paintings in my sketchbook, trying out this and that, to see what I think looks like me, as well as the basic practise of looking and rendering what I see.

So I set up the three larger sketches from the last few days and did some journaling about what I liked about each of them, which one I liked best, and decided that yesterday’s painting is a lovely underpainting, but I want COLOUR.

I did some colour-mixing and note-taking and went with the idea that colour is irrelevant as long as the values are correct, and this is where I got to with that, and I think I’m getting somewhere.

I just have to reel in the overthinking, because it’s trying to get in about and interrupt.

Til the morn,

Suzanne

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