Solo

The Art in Music 2018 exhibition was hung at Newbury Corn Exchange today, and this painting is part of that exhibition.

Mollusc Nebula

A small abstract that turned out to have a mussell shell hiding in it...

The painting was done as an experiment to try out wet-in-wet acrylic techniques, and because I decided I needed some cloudiness in my work.

Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30 cm

Heisenberg 1

The first in a possible series of Quantum Abstracts, this refers to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states (in far more cmplicated terms), that you can't know everything about a particle, and that the better you can pin down one property, the more elusive a complementary property will be.

The numerial suffix does refer to the possibility of more attempts to represent the Uncertainty Principle as an art work. You see, I am really not sure if this does the trick...

Heisenberg 1
Acrylic on canvas with acylic inks, 9 x 12"

Slide

It's an abstract. It means everything or nothing.

I called it 'Slide' because of the curve; I added the curve to break up the perpendicularity of the lines ...

Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm

Peacock Turmoil and other leftover paint

Peacock Turmoil
26 x 20 cm, oil on box canvas

I've been thinking more about abstract art of late (while trying not to think too hard - abstract art does not seem to repay intellectual efforts on the part of the viewer, being better approached via the emotions, I suspect). However, I cannot tell you what emotions are reflected here - no, really, I can't, because I do not know. Mostly I was trying to make the colours and the shapes work together well, and that is neither emotional nor intellectual. I think it must be instinctive.

While Peacock Turmoil did start off as a home for the paint leftover from Linear (there was a lot), I added more paint (mostly blues) from the tubes.

The bicycle, however, was just an opportunistic sketch. (The yellow bit is the inside of the lid of my box of oil paints.)

Oil sketch of (part of) the bicycle lurking in my studio

Some abstracts that I found lurking in a shoebox

Pink

Overgrowth

Both from last autumn, both 5 x 7 inch oils that started off as palette scrapings...

September in the Abstract

Two abstracts-in-progress (both 20 x 20 cm) from yesterday.

My 8-year-old daughter tested out my dribbly acrylic technique;
I tested out the idea of 'tutoring' (and had another go at the dribbly acrylic thing).
I'm not sure, but I think I may have learnt more than she did... except what I learnt wasn't about how to *do* art.

Last September, I posted my first consciously abstract painting, along with an analogy between music and visual art.

This September, I posted my biggest abstract painting to date (I don't make much abstract art), done using a technique that I hadn't tried before.

And... all of a sudden, I have suddenly started noticing abstracts dotted around the online galleries that I frequent when I'm not blogging, painting or otherwise engaged. Is it the time of year?

Giger Counter (Abstract)

The title came to me early in the process of painting this; it's a dreadful pun conflating the name of the Swiss surrealist (who died this May) and the instrument used to measure ionizing radiation levels (spelt 'Geiger' and named after the German physicist). The texture of my picture reminded me of that of some of H. R. Giger's work. The painting was based on the leftover dribbly acrylic from painting the edges of my Really Big Canvas. I liked the effect of the dribbly underpainting on that work, and decided to make a painting that was just about that.

Instrumental Abstraction

I usually paint figuratively (that means that I paint pictures. Of things. Generally, they are things that I can see). But this is an attempt at an abstract painting. It started as paint left over on the palette from another painting; the colours didn't suggest anything in particular, so l just tried arranging then in a manner that pleased me. The results are reminiscent of an underwater scene, I think.