I have been working on my 2m by 2m canvas. I attempted some gestural, Pollock style movements in my painting, but realised that this added a decorative effect and detracted from the unconcious mark making that is my goal. I therefore rubbed alot of the oil paint off with a cloth and worked more pencil marks and emulsion paint over the top. I included some symbols which are meaningful to me in the pencil marks. I think that the smeared paint added another dimention to the painting.
Anton Ehrenzweig (1967:29) states that there is a conflict between purposeful and spontaneous ways of working, while the artist is consciously shaping the large scale composition his unconscious spontaneity will add countless hardly articulate inflections. He states that if the attention is drawn towards these distortions, scribbles and textures it would “interfere with their apparent lack of structure….and rob them of their most precious quality, that impression of unstructured chaos on which their emotional impact and therefore also their unconscious order and significance depends”.
Ehrenzweig, A. (1967) The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imaginatic. London: Weidenfeld.
A question I’m always asking myself is: Is it finished?
