Actually, I had intended to start this blog entry with the words:
“Have a look at this picture:”
But when I wanted to insert the picture I realised I had forgotten to take it… “supermajoreyeroll” plus “facepalm” plus "shakinghead", because this happens a lot when I intend to take some progess pictures...
Instead, I show you the final result of the picture I painted after having “saved” it:
Of course, you can’t see now what I had seen, which was a picture that had turned out wrong. Why? Because there was a bloom along the black outer line that used to be there, before I covered it with black paint.
To give you an idea what I mean by “ bloom along the black outer line” I reproduced the effect:
The bloom happened because I had felt the need to add a background to the picture so that the whole sheet would be filled with paint. I picked a very watered down beige and loosely filled it in BUT I came too close to the black line. The watercolour brush pen I had used got activated and immediately began to bloom into the wet background. Damn! That was not what I wanted. So, in order to make it look as if I had indeed intended it that way, I activated the whole black outline on purpose, which actually only made it worse…
Well, of course I immediately tried to figure out how to save the painting and two ideas came up:
1. Cut it out and glue it onto a sheet of paper with a background in a nice colour
2. Paint the background of the picture in black
I chose the latter only to also have had to add black splatter to the picture to hide some droplets of black watercolour in plain sight. Another “supermajoreyeroll”. I also had to apply a second layer of black paint for which I used gouache paint that I had intended to use in the first place. But I gave watercolour a go to see how this would turn out. Well, it didn’t turn out well.
Now, I am completely fine with the picture BUT one important question came up due to all of this:
Why do I always HAVE to paint a background? Or more precisely phrased: Why am I obsessed with not leaving any part of the paper unpainted except for that frame like edges the masking tape leaves behind?
The answer presented itself to me in form of a memory that popped into my mind; something I was usually told when I showed a picture I had drawn and needed some more paper: “But the picture isn’t finished. The paper is not completely covered with colour yet…”
Little girl I was back then I had no choice but to comply and I obviously still do even though I don’t have to anymore. So, like the old song in my last blog post, this is another track of what I now guess is a whole album of old songs of old conditioning that I need to let go of song by song (see my blog entry “The Old Song” for further details).
So, now that I’m aware of this, I can work on it.
Art really is therapy… or how Louise Bourgeois put it:
“Art is a way of recognizing oneself.”
Realizing all of this was possible thanks to an episode of a tutorial series on Instagram called “Libère ta créativité” by Floria Akhoun (@planetefloria) that made me remember the kinds of doodles I did at school when I needed to space out during a lot of lessons and inspired me to do them again only this time on nice paper with nice colours and so not in order to space out...
Merci Floria pour cette série 🫶🏻 🙏🏻 qui est pour moi le déclencheur de quelque chose d’importante et de super bien.
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