watching paint dry
Posted by orangewink on April 2, 2007
literally. i’m stuck technically and psychologically. did not write ‘cos the last week was painful to record - if real work is making mistakes and living with the consequences, then last week was hard even though i mostly watched paint dry.
the roadblock:
here’s the foundation paint for the next painting - the dimensions, 86 x 51cm suits landscapes more than portraits, and i’m a pple freak, so… huston, we have an unnecessary problem right from the get-go. what in the wide world am i gonna paint now?!
the weird size is an impt story of solving a technical problem to create a creative (composition) problem. which is to say, by trying to be clever, i became a moron.
the original size was to be 86 x 61cm (i got 34 x 24″ stretchers, which is abt right for a portrait), but the left over canvas was not enuf to stretch over it, so i bought two 20″ (51cm) stretchers instead.
oh, clever lil me.
the real deal is to change yr materials to suit yr needs, NOT change yr composition to fit the canvas. DUH. what was i thinking? ans: i wasn’t thinking. hindsight is soooo wonderful…
i had an uneasy feeling while putting the canvas together, but i ignored that and compounded the problem by painting the foundation without any clear idea of what i wanted. i hoped (naively) that it would ‘come together somehow’.
watching paint dry on this canvas for the past week is painful, i’ve learned why landscapes are usually elongated and portraits are not, the hard way, by making unnecessary mistakes.
the right size can dramatize yr message. it’s as simple and as fundamental as that. that’s why landscapes are elongated and portraits are usually not. gonizing abt what to paint, how to fit a portrait onto this odd size has really jabbed home that point. constantly. maybe its a gd idea to leave this alone just to remind me to think.
see, size pre-determines yr composition, you don’t really compose a picture, the size composes the picture. staring at this canvas for hours confirms that. even before the brush touches the paint or the canvas, the preparation of materials needs to be considered very carefully.
so now i’m stuck creatively because of a technical issue i did not treat seriously. psychologically frustrating, haha funny in a human way. i guess most pple live like that most of the time, we try our darnest to fit ourselves into a mould instead of moulding our lives to suit us.
