Many stages in a painting.

Surfing on the internet and in the Youtube world can be very inspiring. Here you can find instructional videos of all kinds and for all levels. As you may know I have been and still am a fan of Nicholas Wilton and his Art2Life. But in my surfing, I found an artist called Pamela Caughey who had a lot of demonstrations videos, and I like very much her approach, so I wanted to try it. I made a lot of strokes and lines with ink on a long stick, so that the marks became very imperfect. And that is the starting point of this painting. The play stage, and then the tidying up.

In my last blogpost I was concerned about all the greens around me in nature. Green in nature is beautiful, but hard to paint, for me that is. I also showed you my summer studio and a painting on the easel, in a start up phase, and from there on it became a problem and a frustration to me. It had a lot of stages before it ended up in the painting above. I guess I got overwhelmed by the beauty of the nature around me. The size is 70 x 100 cm. So you see, it is a long way from the start to the final result. Below you see some of the stages I went through.

Art critique

In my blogpost from 19th of March, I write about the Art Critique I had with Susan Melrath in Art2ife, and I also showed you some of the paintings. The critique showed me that there were large alterations to be done, which are much easier to do in Photoshop than on the actual painting. But it taught me that it is the painting that rules, not the image I collaged on and made my starting point. It took me a long time to start the alterations. But now I have done so, and below you can see the results.

As you can see I did not do exactly what she proposed. I followed my own feelings and how I liked the colours and images to be, but keeping in mind the general principles of design and value.

Now that I have started on these corrections, I feel more brave, so I am working on the second one. It is almost impossible to do what Susan suggests, because she has made alterations in photoshop, and I am dealing with a real painting with a photograph glued on to it. I have taken away a lot from the original painting, the round circle images, and added something else.

As you can see, there is not much left of the original painting, but I have left the «reading lady» to the right. I have also tried to use some of the same colours as in the first panting, in order for them to belong together. But I am not sure this is the final one, maybe you have some suggestions? Or comments?

The summer holidays

Summer vacation is coming up soon, and I start it with an exhibition in Grimstad, in the south of Norway. If you should be in the neighbourhood you are very  welcome to stop  by, I would love to see you. I will be there on the opening day, which is 29th of June. It lasts until the 12th of July.

This exhibition will be the first where I show  abstract art only since 2000. These paintings are from 2018 – 2019. I hope people will like them.

I wish you wonderful summer days!