I spent some time looking back over work from the past several years this weekend. I was just seeing how the work moved from season to season and year to year, examining how the look of the work has changed. How the technique I use continues to evolve. How different colors revolve in and out of the parade of work through the years.
Blue is such a color. I love working with blue and all the different hues within its spectrum. I like its expressive quality and the sheer beauty of the color. It’s easy to see why so many people inevitably say that blue is their favorite color when asked. I see this in peoples’ reactions to work that is predominately blue.
At shows, folks who have followed my work over the years will sometimes ask why I don’t paint more blue pieces. It’s always hard to explain because it sort of defies logic. I mean, I love working with the color. People react very strongly to the blue work. I have only one blue piece in the studio that came back unsold. The works in blue always do well.
So, I should be doing more, logically. But there’s an feeling when working with blue that is hard to explain. I call it color intoxication. There’s an impulse when working with a color that has such a strong reactive quality as blue, especially when your face is constantly a foot or so from the surface of the painting, to be drawn deeply into the color. It’s almost a trancelike state. When I’m in this state I want to only see more of this color, to the point that it becomes obsessive. So, despite it’s positive qualities, I have to pull myself back, have to fight the desire to continue deeper into the color. If I didn’t my work would evolve into a blue drone, abandoning all the other colors that I also love to use.
Maybe that would be interesting as an artistic statement but I kind of doubt it. So I fight the pull of the blue and only do one now and then, just to keep the the beast alive…
Redtree Times 