In 90 minutes.
Is it permissible to call a painting finished—fairly large, 24” x 30”—if it only takes you an hour and a half? Yes. Hail yes!
But this became an issue in class. How can this be finished! It went so fast, didn’t even feel like work.
This large painting was preceded by a smaller study, which took about NINE HOURS. Here’s the study. It seems stiffer, doesn’t it, but many compositional problems were worked out here. By the time Patty, the artist/student, switched to the big canvas, she was so familiar with the basic dynamics that she could loosen up and play with all sorts of additional elements, like the vertical lines in the center.
As happens often, the work looks finished to me, but the artist has doubts. The artist, of course, is closer to the work.
We often rotate a canvas in progress to get a better view of how shapes relate to one another. In this case, both the study (which, btw, was originally planned as a finished painting, not a study) and the large, final painting were worked on in a vertical orientation. As we played the rotation game, the horizontal turned out to look better. Let’s hear it for abstraction!
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 