For Better or Worse

Now that Christmas has come and gone, I am hoping to get back to my regular paint schedule and start getting serious about this new series. I was able to work on two paintings today and am feeling like I am starting to get the hang of this. The work is definitely evolving from what I first imagined, and I hope it's in a good direction.

First up is the one I started last week. I was feeling like it was looking too generic, like there was nothing special, or "edgy", about the piece having just the image of the woman painted on the panel. I added a stripe of text from an old book to the left side, not really sure where I was going with that. I left it for a few days and spent Christmas with my husband, watching MANY movies. 

One of the films that we watched was "Beautiful Losers", a documentary on a group of DIY artists that were greatly influenced by skateboarding, graffiti, and music. They went from being "outsiders" to the mainstream, and are now being shown in some pretty big national and international galleries. The work is no where near like what I am doing now, and I don't plan on changing what I do, but it was great to see them have this "no fear" mentality about their work. This is what they did and you could either accept it or not, but it was who they were so deal with it. It was a great film and I liked their mentality and decided that I needed to take more chances with my art. I went back into the studio with a bunch of ideas of how I wanted to integrate more "grit" into my work, whatever that means. I was going to take more risks with my art and just let things happen, for better or for worse.  

So back to my painting...I added a robin's egg blue to the panel thinking this would be enough for this piece, but now, the more I look at it, I am thinking it needs more. It's still "too pretty". Tomorrow I will be adding a drawing component to the piece, and perhaps more wax so that the woman is set back even more. This is still looking too "safe" for me. I already have something in mind so we'll see tomorrow if it works out. 

I also started the oil painting background of the next piece. This is still underpainting so tomorrow I will finish it up and it will be ready to wax on Wednesday. 

I am getting pretty excited about this series. I'm excited to just throw caution to the wind (or in this case, wax and oil to the panel) and see what sticks. I plan on getting a bit dirty and playing with random juxtapositions of elements in my work. It's going to be fun!