One warm weekend in September 2020 I started putting paint down on eight 24 x 24 inch panels. My early objective was simply to get the paint on quickly and start building a surface of pigment. I prefer household emulsions for this foundational work as they dry fast and have a workable combination of fluidity and viscosity.
This is one arrangement that would form part of a finished piece three months later.
And this was the other. At that early stage I thought they would end up as separate works.
About one week later I took two opposite panels and created a checker effect, assuming that these would probably be painted over later.
This was the result and I thought this might only need a little more work to make the grade as a finished piece.
I left it for six weeks or so whilst I worked on other things. On my return I cut the picture up some more and combined it with the other piece that I'd started the previous month. I now had a promising combination of the angular and geometric, contrasted with panels of lyrical, expressive paintwork. The two don't often mix in abstract painting (scratches head trying to recall an example). It tends to be one or the other.
After a final re-arrangement of the panels I had, for practical purposes, three 'paintings' now each requiring a different approach; random splashing and flinging of black paint on three panels and torn masking tape for the crimson 'rivers of blood' on the two blue panels. I decided to leave the 'checker board' panels untouched because of the dynamism and contrast they would bring to the composition.
On 22nd December I screwed all the panels down onto a backing piece of plywood. For the first time it was now a one-piece object and the painting was finished. All I had to do now was decide the best way up. The portrait orientation to me means it's sitting up to meet our gaze, not laying down. It's not an abstract 'landscape'.
I won't be returning to this but I enjoyed the uncertainty of the process, the element of surprise and the coherence of the finished piece from random methods.
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