#30×30 Day 11 : The Road to Minimalism

This piece was started on Day 09 (you can probably tell – it’s a lot of the same colors in the cups) but I went back and finished it today.

I was looking back at photos of Baie St. Paul, and I thought – this one is a great example of leading lines.

The patterns of the fields – they should be perfect for one of my ‘high horizon’ paintings.

But, when I got started, I kind of lost interest in the foreground. Even though it’s what made me choose the picture in the first place. I think – A: the motion of the foreground isn’t quite ‘inward’ enough – and B: it’s a bit too much like one of my paintings :) It’s a bit like – I’ve done too many of these exact sort of things.

As much as I feel a person’s paintings should be consistent, (to make a body of work that stands as a whole, but also, to recognize what you are trying to make, and continue to improve on it), I also feel, they should not be repetitive.

You don’t want to become a cliché of yourself.

So – this is what I ended up with. I came up with these little dots – maybe they’re bits of grass, or shrubs.

Really, it’s a complete abstraction, starting with the real world, but ending up in a stranger place.

Out of context this might be snow, but it might equally be a desert. Or some alien planet.

I think it’s possible I’m losing focus here on Day 11. I’ve been painting at least two, sometimes three paintings some days, even if I don’t take all of them all the way to finish.

It’s quite normal to ‘burn out’ on the marathon around the mid point. I kind of enjoy this, because – I can feel myself getting annoyed, and that is always the stage where the next few paintings become a breakthrough.