Abstract Workshop #2: Pebbles

Pebbles                              by j. c. phillipps                                 Jan 2012

Hello.  It's week 2 of my practice into abstract painting.  I have to confess that I did a really, really ugly painting last week.  It was so ugly that I scrapped it.  I'm hoping to be able to use the other side of the paper.  I blocked the whole thing out in rectangles and then just started filling in the colors.  The problem I have had in the past was a wack-a-doodle color scheme, so I tried to remedy that by choosing a famous painting and using that scheme.  Nope.  Still stunk.  Maybe I'm not meant to paint rectangles like that.  It was gross.

So I returned to the formula that worked for me the first time: I found a photograph that sparked.

It was actually a sky.  The gradation from blue to lights in cloudy wisps was what got me going.  There was even a little yellow in it.  And one black bird.

So I did the gradation.  And the wisps.  But I wasn't trying to recreate the photograph - only to use it as a starting point.  So no bird.  Instead I made a blue/green shape.  It was that big one kinda in the middle.  Then I made a few more.  Just shapes.  Then, when I had five shapes it started talking to me.

We're pebbles on the shore, they said.

Oh.  Fantastic.  I mean, I didn't then aim to make a realistic pebble painting, but it gave me a bit of a path to follow.

There was a moment when I was weaving the black through that I thought I'd botched it completely, but some wet ochre mellowed it out.  Actually, it was vertical too - but when it was finished I kinda liked it horizontal.

So there you have it.  Abstract #2.  Pebbles.

Happy Tuesday!