This was a joint effort! I painted one and Indigo painted the other. There are many things to talk about with these pieces and I'll just start from the top. First, you're wondering who Indigo is. She is a person that I used to work with. A lot of internet jobs are made available by networking with the people you've worked with or know from job sites. I know a lot of computer people and without really knowing what she does, I'm sure she's the best. Indigo also bought one of my paintings in June, 2000.
We were talking about our industry slowing down and both of us are a little stressed. I told her the best way for me to deal with stress was to paint. The words then turned into an invitation to come over and paint with me. You've got to try this! She told me that she had never painted and I offered to go through some instruction.
I was looking at two canvases the same size, prepared and ready to be painted on. I had this design in my head that spurred from another painting that I am currently working on that is smaller in size. I planned to use these two canvases to just see what I was working on in a much larger scale with only a few improvisations. I told her that sometimes I write what is on my mind at the time of the painting on to the white surface of the canvas and then paint over it. I've enjoyed doing this for a number of years. It is a way to let go of things and I find it very satisfying.
Exploration of color and shape is in the range of about 25% of my paintings. Every part of this diptych was planned out and I looked forward to seeing what would happen with some experiments I had planned with the colors.
Indigo agreed to give a try and came over the next day. We were soon silently writing on our canvases and we both spent about 45 minutes with that. I have no idea what she wrote and I don't think she was interested in what I wrote either. We filled our canvases with words and took a break to kind of look at them.
I explained my design objective and offered a few choices. This set of paintings is all about color and I told her that she would have three boxes and 4 choices of color. Red, Yellow, Blue, & Green.
She chose Red, Blue and Yellow, in that order. My choice was Green, Blue and Red, in that order. The colors and order is significant to me with these pieces because It began defining the differences in the two paintings on an individual level.
I thought it was interesting that both of us had chosen blue in the center. I was excited to see that we had chosen different sets of color too.
