I haven’t painted all week (well, except for a unsatisfactory painting of a flower field that I ended up wiping off) but I’ve been thinking . . . I want my paintings to move more toward the abstract. I don’t want to paint abstract paintings per se, I have more of a painting in mind that you have to look at twice to figure out what you’re looking at. Or you look at the title of the painting and then you get that “Aha” moment when you “see” the painting.
So, all week I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this. I decided I really can’t figure it out sitting on my sofa, I need to try something, see how it works, then go from there. So I pulled out a photo I took on a recent trip to the hill country and I painted only the interesting shapes in the photo. I probably could have cut out even more of this scene and focused on fewer shapes, but this is how I started.
I love painting buildings, they’re what I always come back to, so I’m happy to have found a way to make them pleasing to me. This morning after church I drove over near I-10 north of downtown Houston to take some photos of warehouses, but it was an overcast day and I really only got a couple of good photos. I see now, after painting this painting, how important the bright sun and strong shadows are.
I like the way this painting turned out, it turned out the way I wanted it to (which is not always the case), so for this tiny moment I’ve got a direction to work towards: more of these abstracted buildings. This painting is fairly small, it’s 11″ x 14″ oil on canvas. I really did it small as a study before I painted it much larger. But now that I’ve got a lot of momentum towards abstraction, I may not take the time to paint this one bigger, I may move on to another (possible even more) abstracted building. This is what I love about painting, the pursuit of something new, and those few paintings that turn out the way I want them to.