Last year my paintings were taking weeks, sometimes months to complete. This year I'm taking an improvisational approach to painting and limiting my palette to black. It comes from a desire to keep the work fresh and avoid that stale, over-cooked, dead gallery look that so many contemporary paintings seem to have.
I'm also attempting to bridge the functional divide between drawing and painting. There will always be a place for sketching out ideas roughly in a notepad or any piece of scrap paper to hand but I want to paint with the freedom I draw, without that tightening up that happens when one is consciously trying to get it right, doing something that could end up on a gallery or someone else's wall. This is a successful recent example of where the finished painting was also the first drawing of the idea.
The improvised approach creates the conditions for accidents and surprise, obliging the improviser to pay attention to what's happening and be open to possibilities. Before starting a new piece, I have an overall idea of the finished work in mind but the outcome is never certain.
I apply the oil paint dry and, like Japanese calligraphy, it needs to be correct first time. There is no going back to fix mistakes. I either have to somehow make the mistake work; or change my attitude to the error and let it take me in an unintended direction. Or start again, as I am currently with the piece below.
These two photographs were taken 20 hours apart in my studio. I did several drawings of the idea; the one you can see taped to the drawing board being the most recent. When developing the idea on the canvas, I was committed to using the same fast approach I'd used on the drawings. I wanted the same loose, energetic application of the paint but didn't want to just re-do the drawing verbatim. I wanted to extend the idea a little and leave some room for surprise. I always think an idea can get better; better than I even imagined it.
When it was finished a couple of hours later I was pleased enough with it and took the photo on the left. But as every painter knows, once the euphoria of finishing a painting has passed, it can look a very different proposition the next morning. You'll wonder what you ever saw in it. Some paintings are growers, but I really wasn't happy with this one, it was beyond salvage and I wasn't prepared to wait for it to grow on me.
I couldn't correct it because, with the oil paint down, there would have been no way to remove it without creating an almighty mess. I have two options when this happens; wait for it to dry, re-prime it and try again, or paint over it in black oil and do a negative image of the original idea - white paint on black space. You can see I opted for the latter. There's something exquisite about an all-black canvas but I won't be keeping it like this.
Waiting for it to dry will give me the opportunity to do some more drawing, refine the idea and try again. Hopefully, second time, I'll get it right first time.
Update
The second attempt:
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