Abstract Painting – Pencil Notes

For the past couple weeks I’ve been utterly obsessed with abstract painting. A new frontier. I didn’t know how exciting and absorbing it could be. I’ve always considered myself a figurative expressionist; animals and people mostly. An insect here and there. Landscapes with stories in them. The beginning generally has a shape. In abstract, it’s the opposite. You are painting the invisible until it becomes what it’s meant to be. The color shapes the energy and form. Line can go everywhere and nowhere. And yet it all comes back to something the ear settles into. Compared nicely with musical composition.

What I’m sharing here is simple drawings on card stock. The paintings got to be so maddening, I came back to smaller works. I also was very excited to try out my new Derwent water pencils. Aren’t they something? It’s the little things.

Karine Swenson is a fabulous teacher. She got in there with each one of us and helped us tackle the obscure issues that come up when approaching a blank canvas with a few colors mixed and no idea what you are going to do. It’s not easy teaching a class of such depth online.

I created a space in the garage to paint in oil and to paint large. It was pretty sweet. Blasting the blues and throwing some paint. I have 4 paintings in process. I don’t like any of them yet. I have found this is what happens first. It’s a big ol’ soupy mess of pent up energy. And then the center finds itself over time. Karine introduced us to many great painters. We’ve studied: Gerhard Richter, Jasper Johns, Amy Sillman, Richard Diebenkorn (my fav), Franz Kline and more.

Some quotes I loved:

“I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important.” – Franz Kline

“Now, the idea is to get everything right – it’s not just color or form or space or line – it’s everything all at once.” – Richard Diebenkorn

“Painting is a physical thinking process to continue an interior dialogue, a way to engage in a kind of internal discourse or sub – linguistic mumbling.” – Amy Sillman

So that’s all. Have a wonderful week. I’ll be back with those large paintings soon-ish… as long as I don’t freak myself out with the primordial soup of abstraction.

I am pretty excited about it, I must say. Ta ta!