Painting the blues

Spring Blues

Another music painting. In this one I wanted to focus on blues, but surprised myself by using the entire cool half of the color wheel, from yellow to violet. I'm including yellow because it's a cool lemon yellow, not a warm golden yellow. I'm surprised how balanced it looks, being mainly yellow-green and blues. I thought I would have to add some red or orange to balance all the blues, but I never felt the need. Maybe that's because I do include the complementary pair of yellow and violet, and they're acting as kind of bookends. Analogous colors do constitute an Official color scheme, so I haven't violated any laws.

I did a couple things differently on this painting—I left some of the edges a bit blurry, and some of the note bars a little transparent, and made the background a lot more interesting.

Theme-wise, it's expressing my longing for the bright green foliage of spring in this particularly cold January.

Now offering — Posters!

I thought it might be fun to make some small photo posters of the new music paintings, so I'm now offering two different ones in my storefront on Etsy, patriciaryanart. It was fun choosing the background colors, but I did get some help from a friend.

They are:

and

16"x20" Digital photo print on heavy paper $25 each
You can purchase them HERE.

Music for the eyes

Benny's Bounce

10"x30" Acrylics on stretched canvas $300
If you're interested in this painting, please contact me at patriciaryanart.

Another painting done. I roughed this composition out when I was working on Rhythmism, and it waited till I finished Song For Iris. I was hoping it would have a different look to it, and it does. It's a different take on the blue-orange combination, and feels a lot more energetic and active. I did really enjoy the way the colors and forms began to interweave, and the separate lines interact, just like instruments in a song. With this as with Iris, I wasn't sure how the separate lines would resolve themselves to fit in a two-dimensional space, but they just did, as I kept working. I found that again, I didn't have to think about it or work it out ahead of time—all I had to do was keep working.

A tribute to color

Song For Iris

16"x20" Acrylics on canvas panel SOLD
If you're interested in a painting like this, please contact me at patriciaryanart.

I knew I was going to be able to finish this painting when I finally thought of a name for it: Song For Iris. It's obviously not iris-as-in-eyeballs, it's sort of about iris flowers, but it's really for Iris, the goddess of the rainbow. Color is after all one of my passions.

I picked the violet-yellow pairing in a moment of madness, because I've never done a violet painting before. It is one of the 3 possible primary&complement pigment pairings, so it deserves to be explored, but it was such an unfamiliar combo to me that I really didn't feel comfortable until it was about three-quarters done. I purposely kept the yellows to a very small amount and leaned more heavily on yellow green, which goes so beautifully with red-violet.

I went bigger with this one, too, a 16x20. I was interested in whether or not the music painting idea would translate to a more standard format. I found myself thinking of it as different lines of melody and harmony within a short segment of music, various instruments playing around and in concert with each other.

Fun!

Painting and music are almost the same thing

Rhythmism

15"x30" Acrylics on stretched canvas $325
If you're interested in this painting, please contact me at patriciaryanart.

While I was working on this one, I couldn't stop thinking how much painting a picture is like recording a song. Take out the words colors, hues, tints, shades, intensity, and replace them with words like notes, chords, harmony, volume, and tempo, and you're essentially talking about the same process. It starts with your imagination, you make all the forms and put them together, then you balance them against each other, adapting each one. Then you spend the rest of the time perfecting each bit, integrating it into the whole, and then perfecting the thing as a whole.

As I was doing the final tweaking of the lines and angles, I also thought how that was just like editing a piece of writing, checking for typos, homonyms, and the gremlins of print.

One problem I did not have with this piece was my usual wavering. Whenever I came to a spot I wasn't sure how to deal with, I just thought of it as a piece of music and that helped me see what I wanted to do with that particular bit.

I started my next one this morning, and it's also going to look different from the ones before it, but still blue and orange. In fact, I had to order more paint this morning.

Exploring (Exploding!) complementary color combinations

Yellow Backbeat With A Rising Cadence

8"x16" Acrylics on canvas panel $125
To purchase this painting, click HERE.

After finishing this new one last night, I'm thinking I'm just going to stay with blue and orange for a while. The moods of these last two paintings are so different that I'm wondering just how much range you have within a two-member complementary color scheme. It was a real revelation to stop thinking of pairing single colors in favor of pairing their whole families. (Thank you again, Robert Burridge.) Not just orange, but yellow-orange, red-orange, gold, and citrine (green-orange), paired with true blue, pthalo blue, cyan, greenish blue, violet-blue. Take all those shades and multiply them by a few different values, from pale to darkest, and you have a forest of colors to play with.

It's like throwing a party for your favorite couple, and inviting all their interesting friends to come too.

Painting music

Blue Projection

8"x16" Acrylics on canvas panel
To purchase this painting, click HERE.

While I was working on my last painting, I went to Bob Burridge's website and watched a lot of his videos. I've always enjoyed his figurative series; they're very personal, original, and of course brilliantly colored. I was wishing (again) that I could come up with a personal theme for a series that would last me more than a few ideas. There was some particularly interesting jazz playing on KMHD, and this image appeared in my head that I knew was a visual representation of the song I was listening to, and it was as interesting to me as the song was. I thought, I love music, I should paint how music sounds to me. It felt like the best idea I'd had in years.

I let the idea incubate while I finished up Council Crest, then made my first attempt. It didn't look appealing at all until the second pass when I started layering the colors, and from that point I just got more and more into weaving the two main color groups together. It does not look much like my original idea, so I have to keep trying for that, but that's a problem I'm happy to have.

It's been a long time since I've painted an abstract anything, and I've really enjoyed the freedom of doing one again. I really do need the practice in working playfully and experimentally, and it's so much more relaxing to do that when there's no limit to the liberties you can take.

The color scheme owes a lot to Bob Burridge's examples and his goof-proof color wheel, and his message about painting for fun can't be repeated often enough. I regularly visit his website when I'm looking for inspiration.