Here, my guiding prompts were ‘Struggle’ and ‘Recovery’. As in the others, I was holding events in my career in mind, as I worked through my ideas here. At the time of creation, my future was very uncertain with my company.

This painting gave me the most difficulty. For the other two I could more easily connect with my subject matter, and navigate my way through the creation of the painting. But here, I didn’t have a sense of what ‘recovery’ meant. This painting became something of a negotiation with myself, as I navigated the ambiguity of where I was going and the false steps that have occurred along the way. It was an illuminating process.

Small Test

Using pouring medium, create an underlayer w/ some metallic pigments. Then layer on top, building the image up using line. I like how layers of construction lines come together, and convey an almost temporal quality.

Thoughts

  • When we got into ‘recovery’ as a prompt, boxing poses came up, along with some basic standing/sitting contemplative poses as we got our feet under ourselves.
  • Within the square constraints I’ve given myself (all panels are the same dimensions), fitting a composition has been a bit harder.
  • Moving the boxing fists into something more ‘clutching’ or ‘pulling’ is interesting as then I can imagine interacting with the surface. I want to including the newsprint as a visual theme, and the aluminum foil-backed paper had interesting and different shapes. Perhaps Matt can be pulling or struggling as part of the recovery process.
  • The above led to a few false starts (one captured at bottom of this post) before coming back and finalizing my more abstracted result.
  • Going into this project I was inspired by works created by misha, or Alan Arcilla

Referenced Artwork

Alan Arcilla (2022) Harris. [Oil and charcoal on paper] 59 x 42cm.
misha (2023) bus outro. [charcoal on paper] 42 x 30 cm.

Full Size

Building the under layers
Between this and the next, I went through a series of painting my final image — that I failed to capture, then peeling the entire surface off the panel and starting almost from scratch. The catharsis of peeling off the painting was very enjoyable, honestly.

I found the poured underlayer to be very unsatisfying, and difficult to integrate in the larger image. You can see some remnants of that surface near the middle head & orb.

I like the torn edges that this reveals, and feel that this adds to the “uncertainty” that I was thinking about.

I came back in and modeled the yellow sphere to be dimensional and “solid” in comparison to everything else in the image. Something solid to aspire to. This is a terrible photograph.

False Start

Before going back to my sketchbook, and building up the final idea, I had a few false starts. Below follows one of them, up to when I painted over the whole thing in white.