I had a lot of fun creating this. I began painting the black web and then decided to put in a square. I wanted to have something relate to the black strip that you see on the left. Now why did I paint the black strip? Well, This canvas is almost perfectly square. A 3 inch difference, but close. Painting on something square is very challenging. I narrowed the focal point by placement of the black strip. You have to have things balance or it isn't going to please the eye in the manner or style that I'm comfortable with.
Which gets us back to the squares. Once I put the first square in there I knew I would be following up with the other two. On Sunday I did the math to make sure everything was all nice and lined up and as easy as all of this looks, it isn't. Especially when you're dealing with very wet oil paint. The multicolored background was dry. I did that a few weeks ago and used some Liquin to speed up the drying process. I got the outlines of the squares nice and tidy by using post it notes. Some call it cheating, I call it resourceful. Bottom line it looks great and I'm very pleased with the outcome of the squares and placement.
I struggled with what I was going to put in the squares. I though about putting hearts in there, I thought about putting eyes in there. I thought about just filling the squares with flat colors. I thought about a lot of things but I wanted the development to flow without hours of thought time. I did stare at this canvas for hours, as I do all of my works while they are in development, but I wasn't going to let myself walk away from it. I recognized my need to paint over these past few days and decided to keep it simple.
The decision to put in the white web worked out better on a couple of different levels. The first level, it brought out the color of the background a lot more and seemed to push the black back a little. Hold your thumb up and cover up the white and you'll see what I mean. A fellow artist at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago told me that she felt that the most important thing about a background is fluctuation in degrees. Her words ring to me overtime I think about using background color.
You'll notice that the upper portion of the painting I left alone and my reasoning for this was to balance, again, with the black strip. Use your thumb again and cover that part up. The negative space, I'd call it, allows the viewer to have a place for their eyes to kind of rest and say to itself, "ahh, that's nice." It allows the piece to breathe.
Although this piece doesn't have some deep seeded meaning, some soulful power at work, it has beauty, unification and thought out design.
Final note, there's a Duck in here. What is a Duck? A Duck is something that your eyes are always drawn to. Something that no matter how you look at the painting, your eyes can't get away from it. I'm not going to tell you what my Duck is because if I did, you wouldn't be able to get over it either. I kept it because I think it is funny and I'm okay with it. If you really want to know what it is, email me.
