I’ve Stopped Crying
Studies have shown that as a baby between the first two to four weeks of your life you develop basic emotions and gradually build complex emotions from that point on. I remember as a child crying a lot. I think it was because my motor skills hadn’t developed enough for me to pick up a paint brush and express the emotions my cries weren’t getting out for me at the time. Painting is such a huge emotional experience for me. I would probably be still crying as an adult in a corner someplace with people trying to figure out what was wrong with me as my parents did when I was an infant. Creating art has made it possible for me to express the things that I am feeling that I can’t express with words. Communication isn’t just talking. I want to evoke an emotion from the viewer that they cannot explain. The idea that one person can look at an abstract piece of art and see one thing and the next viewer can see something completely different enthuses me. I don’t want to limit my art to just one subject. I make art for art.
Jackson Pollack said; “Try to receive what the painting has to offer you and not bring a subject matter/ preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for.” When I read that it let me know that being an abstract expressionist could be so opened ended. The themes that I create on my own could be completely different then what another person looking at it would be. I choose a brush and oil paint because it allows me to be as expressive and bold as any other medium. I use color from the tube. I mix every color I lay on the canvas. I use my fingers to place and mix the paint. It really lets me feel how the oil work and lets me really get into it. Every tube of oil is different. Touching them allows me to know how much paint thinner I need to get the texture that I want in my piece. I love building texture on my pieces. It shows that there are layers and layers of something that you can’t even see underneath it all. To get texture you put layers and layers of paint. The viewer does not know what it took for me as an artist to get to the piece that they are looking at in front of them. There is so much depth underneath it all that even I sometimes forget that it is there. It’s almost as if you don’t know where the piece has been to get to what you are seeing right now. When I work I put on music and paint and don’t think twice about what I want to do. I let my emotions and thoughts pour into the work and leave it at that.
I have been highly influenced by Joan Mitchell and Jackson Pollacks work trying to put my own twist into the fine art chaos that they produced. I paint every canvas with yellow before I start painting. The color leaves me with such potential. The color yellow to me can go dark or brighter it’s limitless in my opinion. If gives the pieces such energy to begin with. I found myself doing it accidently and just stuck with it. Yellow is versatile and draws attention to the piece. The color yellow represents optimism, enlightenment, promise, positive, energy, and creativity. I want to reproduce those meanings for every piece I do. Hans Hoffman said “there are many painters who can make the sun become a spot of yellow paint, but only an artist can make a spot of yellow paint become a sun.”
