10. Additions

(9/5/23)

A quick update to the painting I had started last week. I got a small segment of time to be able to make at least a bit of progress to the new painting I started so I outlined the rib cage bones with a mustard yellow pastel and then in areas did a slight line of pink with a pink oil pastel. This was an attempt to accentuate the shape of the bones, which I think has worked quite well as it gives the bones a definite shape and the contrast of the yellow against the white pops and works very well. I enjoy how rough and naive the outline is, this injects energy to the work and allows it to not be tied to any real life idea of what bones or the structure of a body is, as I am very much not chasing a photorealistic or anatomically correct representation of a body or bones. After that I added what you could call the flesh or the body to the painting on the form of s light blush pink emulsion paint, this colour works well in contrast with the white and yellow that I have already used to outline the bones and gives me a good foundation to build on now I have the shape of a body outside of the bones I initially started with. I also added more scribbles with charcole and graphite sticks just as I had done with the white chalk and pastels last week but this time with black and grey as I belive this adds a new layer of energy just as the white scribbles had, but this time there is A contrast that will show through even if painted over. I see these scribbles as placeholders or space fillers, not in a negative or derogatory sense, but in the sense that it occupies a space but not totally, so it adds energy and presence to a space that otherwise would appear blank, lifeless and uninteresting if not for the scribbles. But I also acknowledge that empty space can be eaqually as important as the space filled, and it is this balance that has to be struck in order to create compelling work. 

The last thing I did to the painting my was paint the head space in with a pale sand colour which has worked nicely, this was purely in order to have a base layer for features of a face on the head when I add in the future. 

Below I have pictred the progress I have made today. 

I previously talked about scribbles and marks I had made in this painting and an artist I have looked at that had inspired this is the American Painter Cy Twombly. His abstract works of either multicoloured scribbles on a page or huge gestural sweeping red scribbles on masive canvases had an impact on my and how I viewed making marks and the energy I attacked the mark making process with. I wanted there to be lots of life in these marks I made so I drew inspiration from works by Cy Twombly. I will attatch some examples of his work that I have take inspiration from. 

As you can see on these works there is a wealth of energy in these works and this is executed in the lawyering of the scribbles that appear as one entity at first glance but when you look closer you see the layers of marks that have been made and you begin to decipher the mess and see the individual dynamic marks. The composition is also interesting because as I previously mentioned there is not only a wealth of marks made, but also a lot of space that has been left eithe blank or sparsely occupied by the marks , and I believe this adds to the power of the pieces because there is blank space between the marks and on the outsides to act as a counterpoint to the marks that have been made prominent and arguably are only made prominent by the space with absence of marks. Although the part of the paninting I used inspiration from Cy Twombly in is small, the techniques I have implemented are effective and have brought life to my painting by adding almost radiation like marks to the body thus providing an energy to it. 

More Later 

Lots Of Love 

John Hancock X