Discovery vs. Planning

House of Love

This one evolved quickly to something very different from what I started to paint. As Bob Burridge would say, it turned left quickly and kept going all the way to the end. I started with a random distribution of the large, short strokes, playing particularly with the violet and red-violet against a yellow-orange background. I covered the canvas the first day and was totally unsatisfied with what it looked like. The next morning I decided the problem was exactly that—it looked random, and stationary—with no direction or energy. I first worked on developing two dark areas, but it still didn't have any energy so I began repainting it, organizing the strokes into to groups and a movement pattern began to emerge.

Pattern begins to emerge

At that point I started liking where it was going, and realized it wanted to be vertical rather than horizontal. I kept working with that, adding more groups and finding a pleasing pattern with the different hues of violets and yellow-oranges. I'd give anything if I could figure out how to get the many shades of yellow orange to translate to computer images. I tweak the heck out of them in photoshop, but my camera doesn't capture them correctly (the top photo is pretty close, though.)

It was actually the twisted colors in the photos that led me to add the bits of green to balance the one-sided hot palette, though—a real serendipity because I would never have come up with that, and I really like the green with all the oranges now. It's closest to a violet-orange-green triad, but with a lot of intermediate colors.

The title came to me as soon as the pattern emerged, but I couldn't understand it till it was totally finished and I realized how symbolic it was for me personally, having to do with personal growth and the challenges of life.

My process ended up being largely one of discovery and invention, rather than executing to plan. As soon as I focused on letting it evolve, finding the things I liked and being OPEN to keep repainting until it began to talk to me, it became fun and kind of exhilarating to work on it. Scary, definitely challenging, but very rewarding in the end.