Dear reader,

(this text I used also in my entry for Jane Davies course – you might read that between the lines. In the course I have to evaluate my work, so you can read it here.)

 
I only returned this weekend from French Brittany, so I had monday and tuesday to paint for the assignment. (See for the assignment yesterday: it is about creating tension between busy and quiet space).

This assignment was interesting and important for me.

My own paintings tend to be very busy (the whole surface is covered with patterns, scribbels, etcetera). I know I like quiet space in other peoples paintings, so I tried sometimes not to paint the whole surface so busy. But I hardly ever managed.

Now I see (at least) two possibilities.

One is, that in my painting, I am drawn to more ‘full’ paintings. There are also a lot of painters who make ‘full’ paintings, that I like also very much. So I don’t want to ‘force’ myself to paint quiet parts if the painting does not want to go that way.

The second one is, that I just like my scribbles and patterns and interesting structures so much, that I just don’t want to let go of them. I like them all, I don’t want to kill my darlings. And in this assignment I discovered the second reason might play a bigger part then I thought.

I recognize that, because I know that I only hesitantly painted some stuff over.

Because of time pressure, I did these paintings more or less ‘on purpose’. I did not let the painting paint itself, creating many layers, not knowing where I would land. Of course I did that quite a bit (that might be my way of painting, that I work very intuitively and rough), but I did also a bit of ‘planning’. I think you can see that, but: it is because of time pressure, so I take that into account.

I used more or less the same format (black shapes cut or torn out of tissue paper), and bove that white, red and black crayon, and fingertips of blue paint. And crayon scribbles underneath. Because of practical reasons, but it also gave me possibilities to make comparisons (big shape vs little shapes, hard edged shapes versus torn shapes f.i.)

Where my usual paintings are more ‘centralized’, now I have to create quiet space, they become more ‘out of center’. Which creates an interesting tension: I like that, and I am going to take that with me in my other paintings.

Thank you for reading!

Simone