Composition

What am I working on? I finished something: 8 small works on watercolor paper and framed in sets of two. They are now in our office building, in the hallway. That building is sort of a ‘captive audience’. A very silent audience, now with corona…

Here is number one, or actually numbers one and two:

They are dated 2019. They are really 2020, but I wasn’t thinking when I signed 19, and I only discovered this when they were framed already…

The Story
I was in Spain for a conference and a vacation in January this year. I had brought watercolor paper and pens and ink. I wanted to work on some art, but it seemed cumbersome to bring an easel and a big canvas and acrylic paints, and also risky to paint in a rented apartment or a hotel, with the possibility of causing stains…

Warhol
What I had planned, was to so some ‘blotted line’ drawings. I had seen a perfect instruction video on line, that showed exactly how Andy Warhol used this technique. But once in Spain, it turned out there was no way I could do the blotted lines. I still don’t know why. I did everything exactly as it was shown in the video, but it didn’t work. Either no ink was transferred at all, or big stains were transferred. And it had seemed so simple…

White paper
So then, since I had these materials with me anyway, I started making abstract colored compositions, enjoying how the ink behaved. I kept it up. I am still doing it now, in April. I ran into the problem that I couldn’t add large white areas with the inks. Always a problem in acrylics too. So improvising, I started gluing torn pieces of white paper and this blended in surprisingly well with the watercolors.

I can keep working on each of these compositions for a long time. I mean, many, many additions, changes, coverings, different materials and so on.

De Kooning
How come? I wouldn’t have done this normally, I guess, but I was at the same time taking a course on abstract expressionism (New York School) and I was reading the lesson on de Kooning. Of de Kooning it was said that he never finished a work. Paintings escaped from his studio sometimes… In other words, he kept working on his paintings for years. So with these compositions too, I kept changing them forever. Although in my case it was more weeks that years, but still. Some of them must have gone through at least 20 changs. Sometimes this resulted in overworking, of course. But I’ll get back to that in next post.

Here they are, all 8 of them. They look a lot darker in the photograph…