Gesture and Layering

If you want to paint fast and in layers, acrylic is your best medium. One layer of gestural splashes, as in this painting by Keren Vishny, can dry in about ten minutes. This is quite an exciting way to paint. Though it may seem careless and easy, it is neither. Working like this takes a lot of concentration. It’s like doing a dance step with the same expression but allowing slight variations as long as they fit into the expressive range. Theme and variation.
Above is the finished painting. Here on the right, the almost finished painting, where the vertical drips in the middle were felt to be too insistent, too demanding on the eye because they were uninterrupted. (Enlarge and compare to the finished work.)
The painting can fall into the category “Abstract Expressionism” and also in “All-Over Painting.” When working in this “all-over” mode, patters tend to emerge with one element assuming a starring role. As soon as one element stands out, the all-over feeling is destroyed. The artist must always stand back and see the whole.  It’s  not easy to paint this way.
Painting by Keren Vishny, acrylic on canvas, 40”x30”
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Inventing Stripes

What the artist saw was a ball and a ribbon. A ball and a ribbon can make an interesting drawing, but the challenge with a still life like that is inevitably the “background.” There’s no such thing as “background.” That’s a modernist credo and I uphold it. In the modernist sensibility, every square inch of the painting or drawing has to hold the viewer’s interest. What to do? You invent. Maggy Shell invented the stripes.
She could have invented a wall paper of polka dots or hibiscus with hummingbirds. Why are stripes a good, possibly the best, choice? Because the stripes present a variation on the ribbon motif which is the largest part of the still life. What we get, therefore, is a theme-and-variation–always engaging, in whatever art form we find it: music, poetry, storytelling, painting, drawing, sculpture. This invention takes the drawing out of the category  “illustration” and makes it art.
Drawing by Maggy Shell, charcoal, ~14 x 18.
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