Painting for me has always been more like reading tea leaves than faithfully representing something sitting before me. I have always found that the excitement in painting was in not knowing exactly what would emerge from the blank sheet of paper or canvas, having to deeply look into the surface trying to discern what movement or stroke might be next. Trying to make out the outline of something, anything, in the first puddles of paint that might become something tangible. Much like seeing things in the clouds except with this, the clouds are controllable, to a certain point.
It’s something I’ve done since I was a kid. I remember laying on the living room floor in the old house on Wilawanna Road, looking up at the white curtains my mom had over every window. At the edge they frilled out a bit and in that edge I could see faces- peering eyes, flaring nostrils and gaping mouths. It filled a lot of time during my pre-teen years when I was often alone.
The piece above was one of the first things I did when I first picked up painting after my accident many years back. It was done with airbrush paints that had been lying around for years. It started with a large puddle of colors on the right and I simply started dragging paint from the puddle, forming the brow. I didn’t know it was a brow but it began to look like one to me and that led downward to the nose. That shape led to another and to another and soon an image emerged, something tangible that had its own power, its own life and story. Like reading tea leaves…
That is pretty much how I still paint to this day, with variations in the technique. I find it an exciting and always enlightening way to work. Always the potential for something new and different, which keeps life in the studio interesting.
Redtree Times 