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| Oil on canvas, 25 x 35 cm |
When I visited Alex in his studio a few weeks before, he talked about not naming parts of my drawings and about his approach to working. We talked a lot about colour. I was intrigued and in the spirit of the NEAC scholarship, signed up. The space is fabulous and Alex has a good group of people on Tuesdays. I slotted in to the third and last session of painting this model, although others painted the view out the window, and set up still lifes to work from too. I was on the darker side of the model and as the day wore on it became darker and darker, so dark that I really couldn't see what colour I was mixing at the end.
As a result, the trajectory of my painting went from excited passages to a struggle between too dark and not dark enough and it changed in colour. At about 2pm, it was quite muddy but Alex was great at giving me a suggestion and I think I found a way to show the light. I wasn't so successful at adopting Alex' way of working in terms of blocks of colour, though. At the start I thought I knew what he meant but later when I saw him painting I realised he was talking about much bigger blocks of colour than I had imagined. He blocks in the big areas of colour and then works to the more specific, finding that sweet spot between too much and not enough information. He feels that correct colour says almost enough about a subject to describe it. The colour he saw was much brighter and more high key than the colour I saw. Perhaps when we talk about painting the colour we see we are talking about different things?
So my painting has a few places where I like the painting, but mostly just feels boring and descriptive to me. I don't feel I have got into the emotion of the situation nor created an interplay of light dark and brushtrokes that is particulalry exciting or original .
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