An Artist's Thoughts on the Creative Process: Returning to Oil Paint

'Dawn Poem,' acrylic and oil paint on board, 45 x 30 cm

In a week or so I will finish my review of the Beijing International Art Biennale, once I have collated all the sizes of the artwork and names of the chosen artists, but for now I'm posting a few new and reworked paintings from the past 8 days.

A recent painting, posted on October 17th, shows some of my current interests and how I'm exploring the fluid qualities of acrylic paint because it allows me to parallel the approach of working with ink on rice paper. However, this week I decided to go back to using oil paint and to rework some older paintings. It's always good to break the 'pattern' of working for an extended period of time in one medium; it allows you to see things afresh and combine the best of several mediums, if you choose. It allows for new questions.

Much of my work focuses around questions such as: can I take this risk? does it have meaning and make sense in visual terms? does it have to make sense according to pre-determined rules? can I extend the boundaries of past ideas? am I being surprised by the elements; are they expressive of my inner world? I've written quite a few blog posts about these questions which have helped me to clarify aspects of my journey and I always hope they may be helpful to readers.

I love to work on top of old paintings because there's already substance and potential to excavate. I can 'live' the worlds emerging in the paint as fresh new colour begins a relationship with older paint. The first two of these four paintings relate to my recent insomnia and seeing the first light of dawn. The Dawn paintings are a bit more abstract, bringing thick paint qualities back in to my mind. While the first Dawn painting is more structured with colour, the example below is toying with an emptier, looser kind of space.

'Dawn Rising,' oil and acrylic on board, 60 x 40 cm

I tread in circles around a form of calligraphic mark making and colour, letting my imagination inform the various elements, and a series of paintings which tend to have horizon lines and are more landscape based, such as this one.

'Fiona's Place,' oil, oil bar, and acrylic on board, 45 x 65 cm

And paintings which almost seem to excavate their shapes and rhythms....

'Windswept Landscape,' oil and acrylic on board, 40 x 60 cm

(The colours in the above painting are not quite correct - there's a delicate red shape running through the lower quarter of the painting which just doesn't show up at the correct value and which really informs the sense of space in this work.)

I worked on the 4 paintings in the same session which is quite helpful as there's no pressure on any one painting. 

I'm going to leave these paintings as 'finished' because I feel that they have stopped 'speaking' to me of the need for further work, and I'm sitting today hoping my new stretchers may arrive so I can start new work.