Time to Incubate . . .

Ok, after four classes at Art & Soul I hit total overwhelm . . . I needed a little time to absorb it all and let it marinate . . . My last class on Sunday was with Traci Bunkers. It was a very cool self-portrait class. We took a photograph of ourselves, cut it into four pieces, blew it up on a copier, and then used it essentially as an underpainting and built up layers of color, collage, and texture on top of it. The idea is to work on each piece of the image separately and then integrate them into a unified piece. I like fragmenting images, and I've used photocopies as underpainting before (I can get really lazy about drawing and love this kind of shorcut!). I used a fun, kind of sexy-sassy picture that my friend Michael Burton took of me (he also did the shot of me on this blog).
And while I like elements of each fragment, I ended up not liking the way the fragments come together . . . . Part of it is that I ended up working very opaque with acrylics and collage materials when I think a little more transparency would have served me well. I also didn't do much to integrate the pieces.



And I can be pretty stubborn - meaning I plan to work the piece until it comes to some kind of resolution.

And part of that for me is setting it down in my studio or somewhere else where I'll walk by it several times a day and keep my subconscious working on it. I may eventually just let it go - decide the piece itself isn't really interesting, and just take the idea and do other things with it. Or it may be like the painting I started ten years ago and still haven't finished. It's sitting there, and yet it's still engaging me. Come to think of it, that painting is also a portrait, and it's fragmented to a certain extent . . . themes.