Art Takes 1 - Abstract Fluidity

Show Notes

Summary

Art Takes are a new flavour of episode where we listen to Alex while at work in his studio. In this episode Alex is working on an organic abstract artwork using fluid paints while musing on mindfulness, process, chaos, the nature of colour, technique, composition and loads more.

Transcript

I’ve taken to recording pretty much any thought that comes into my head and that includes when I’m wandering around my studio working on artworks and thinking about things and getting ideas and and so I’ve got a few of these recordings and I thought maybe I’d share them as a bit of an insight into my creative process and how I think about things in real time. This particular one seems quite relevant to various of the subjects I’ve covered in recent months including process, flow states, mindfulness and various other things and I give a bit of insight into my actual working processes and materials that I use and this is really what my brain does when I’m engaged in the creative process. It was recorded using my headphone mic so the sound quality isn’t amazing. Somewhere in the middle of it I had to cut out a whole bit where I used a hair dryer and therefore you couldn’t hear me at all and I don’t really know what I was thinking talking over a hair dryer. There’s lots of sort of shushing sounds which is me using my spray bottle to wet the canvas that I’m working on. So I hope you can ignore those and you can hear what I’m saying and you find this interesting. See you again soon for a proper episode.

One of my favourite things to do is to use a combination of water and acrylic inks and drip them, splash them and let them flow across the canvas. I say it like it’s one of my favourite things to do as a technique. I really love the effects that it makes but also I really love watching it. It’s enthralling watching colours mix and merge and take unexpected paths across a canvas and sometimes I’ll have done something to the canvas to encourage that. Sometimes I just let the inks and the water do their work so I’ll drip some water in a certain, drip some ink in certain place or maybe I’ll wet the canvas first in places then I will drip some ink in various bits and usually sort of angle the canvas and let it drip but only a slight angle because I don’t want it to drip down too fast and what I like is that as it drips it leaves a sort of trail of much thinner liquid behind it and that sort of dries a different rate and you know as a colour drips down the canvas it often merges with other colours I put on there and so you get organic mixing of colours as it traverses the canvas creating little trails of ephemeral pigment and then when it dries it has a sort of like what you see with watercolour around the edges you get these little concentrated hard edges that I find absolutely beautiful and enthralling. I think watercolour is a little bit too delicate from my sensibilities and my general approach so I don’t do a lot of it but I spend a fair amount of time trying to achieve the sort of same effects you can get on watercolour with acrylic paints on canvases and sometimes I win sometimes I don’t. It’s even better when you’ve got some texture on the canvas that could be some collage but it could also be like I’ve got some modelling gel on here that’s been dried some of it quite thick in various sort of semi-organic patterns and the paint is finding its way in and through the grooves and finding strange paths, strange organic paths down the canvas. Obviously it’s falling down in the ridges between the paint strokes leaving this sort of pattern to emerge. As it slowly drips down the paint the inks run out of momentum and they start to dry up so I spray a bit more sort of towards the top which allows more of the you know more ink to flow down and maybe if it’s getting very light I’ll add a bit more ink. Well I try not to get involved with where the paint is going because I often think that nature’s a better artist than I am and I should just stop meddling but I find it hard to do so. I find this process so mindful and generally just sort of absorbing and fascinating and I’m no expert on fluid dynamics or anything like that but maybe I should be. Maybe I need to find out more so I can create some more fun with these canvases. Yeah it’s hard hard not to meddle but then you do meddle like I’m doing right now which I really shouldn’t be and sometimes it makes things better sometimes it makes it worse but most times it’s acrylic paint so you can just paint over it and start again and use what you’ve created to you know create somewhat of a bit of a different effect sometimes or you know I don’t like to throw things away and I don’t like to waste beautiful things that are beautiful organic patterns that have been created on a canvas. My phone’s got quite a good macro lens on it so I sometimes get close up photos of these little creations although it’s quite hard to do given the lighting. So right now I’ve got this abstract piece that I’m allowing the paint to find its way down. Some of it’s exactly what I was hoping and some of it isn’t and you sort of have to take a decision look lots of little decisions on the fly as to you know how to react to that but I’m not averse to playing around a bit and especially since I didn’t know where this was going anyway I’m not too bothered if it goes a bit weird and also as I do this I get ideas I try and create a fair amount of chaos around me at any given point in time because when I do something like this and something different happens to what usually happens because you know I’ve I’ve treated the canvas slightly differently or different pattern different mediums and so on and so something happens and maybe it doesn’t suit this particular piece but I can then use that or use what I learned from this to to create something new and interesting it doesn’t always work it’s not always profitable but I think the other thing I’ve got going on here is since I I don’t really know how to conceive of abstract paintings letting nature do its thing gives me hints and points directions for me into how to progress and and try different things and this is sort of the same way that I use like my AI and neural network to uh to ideate for me as well as create artworks so sometimes I’m like oh I really wish you’d point in this direction and I’ll I’ll try and give it a little bit of help um I’ll be careful because sometimes you know be careful what you wish for there you go I’ve got a little stream going down here now it’s beautiful look at that that’s amazing one of the main problems with this approach is that because it takes it’s quite wet as a wet as the paints are wet and the inks are wet some of the patterns that emerge as it’s flowing um pretty much dissipate as you let it dry because the paints just continue to sort of mix into each other even if you lie it down flat then it’s a bit of a shame but I’ve tried various ways to fix these beautiful patterns and you know one obvious way is to try and dry it you know use a hairdryer or something and it’s going to uh it’s going to move the paint around um which is which is not what I want um I sort of just sort of let nature do its thing one of the things that was what this is doing at the moment which is something I’m sort of less fond of is that um it’s not symmetrical and I like things to be even it doesn’t have to be symmetrical it just has to have I like things to be balanced they’re the yin and yang thing it does occur to me that creating things that are unbalanced if it gives the viewer a slightly uncomfortable feeling and in some ways that’s mission accomplished but I have to like the things I make because that’s how I know when they’re finished and when things are out of kilter when they’re not balanced I I very much struggle to ignore that um so I always end up meddling because it’s like an itch you got a scratch or like a stain on the carpet or something that just bugs you it’s irritating I don’t want that they’re gonna go and clean it off and so that’s what happens I meddle and sometimes that’s for the better and sometimes it’s really really not and who knows where this one’s gonna go but I’m lacking a bit of balance here but I guess one way to approach that is that you know you’ve got a bit of unbalance going on this side that you can try and coerce it to create a bit more weight down the other side to even out a bit and uh that’s what I’m going to do now there’s a nice little ridge here that I can see if I can get this paint to drip down yeah balance is important to me um even though I don’t suppose I leave the leader particularly balanced life but I think my artistic brain my autistic brain likes likes order it likes things to be in the right place I think part of that is symmetry and balance and I’m fine with that um but it can get a bit annoying feeling like I have to always make things just so but then also my autistic brain likes weird stuff I like strange compositions as long as they feel balanced to my brain maybe no one else can see what I think of as balance but um I can see it so now I just sprayed this with some really dark gloomy blacky bluey browny color and it’s dulled everything down and I don’t think I have a problem with that because I quite want this piece to be quite dark whatever it is so I’m sort of okay with that but then you know I’ll probably come in tomorrow see what it looks like and think to myself yeah that’s not that’s not staying like that uh and then just paint it all out and start again I’ve done that so many times but then it sort of gives you opportunities to experiment some more I know that’s one of the reasons I work with acrylic paint is so you know you can just scratch it and start again I’m good with that and as long as I’m not throwing away things that are actually good then I’m fairly easy with this stuff and really that’s always bang on about anyway it’s all about the process anyway uh for me and therefore strictly speaking if I paint stuff out and start again then you know it’s two for the price of one I’ve just got to be careful just not to get rid of stuff that people might actually like and you know might want to buy I’ve got the preference for building things up in layers even if it doesn’t actually fundamentally agree with my constitution I like the effects you can get by putting lots of glazes on because the colors underneath shine through and it gives really complex uh unpredictable and quite beguiling effects rather than just sort of mixing fields of color you know this bit’s got to be green and this bit’s got to be blue I like to sort of create an illusion of of depth of of lots of colors because that’s what the world around this looks like there’s no such thing as a thing that’s just blue it’s it’s just reflecting you know all sorts of colors it’s just primarily blue and it all depends on how much sheen or gloss it’s got on it and you know the shade of blue and and of course if it if it’s blue uh this it’s the color that it’s reflecting most of which means the one thing it isn’t is blue uh it’s every other color and so I sort of um I like to try and reflect the fact that excuse the pun that uh that everything is all the colors and there’s always any surface that you go and look at be it a tabletop or someone’s skin on their face or their hands it’s all different colors all reflecting lots of different things and I like to accentuate those colors I like to celebrate color so my works tend to be quite vibrant um for the better or for the worse anyway that’s probably enough for now