Description
When I painted this piece, I wasn’t very active with my art. I was trying to get back into it but I was working, doing a 3 hr daily commute, my boyfriend had just moved in, and I had just achieved a Masters with Distinction from one of the top art colleges on the planet but was currently working for less than I earned when I did admin temp jobs pre-Masters. My emotions were all over the place.
One evening I sat in the taxi and 3 trains that it took to get home and I stewed. My insides felt like a flippin’ cauldron. By the time I got home I was so wound up, I couldn’t even do more than grunt a greeting. It was sit-and-scream til the neighbours called the police or…or… when I slammed into the spare room and saw my box of paints. I knew.
All I had at the time was a pad of canvas paper, so I snatch it up and opened 2 tubes of paint – Black and Blue – because that’s exactly how I felt. The boyfriend (now my husband) walked in while I was covering the paper in black. My back was to him but I could hear him and honestly, I prayed he would just leave and not say a word because I didn’t want him to bear the brunt of something that was in no way his fault. God must have heard me because a few seconds later, the door closed and I relaxed marginally as I re-immersed myself into the black and blueness of my art.
At some point I must have thought I needed to add some sort of highlights because hints of white do appear on the artwork but I couldn’t really tell you how.
I do know I used a synthetic brush overloaded with at least two unmixed colours and rolled it between my fingers as I pulled it slowly, jerkily down the canvas.
I think I cried all through painting that piece but at the end I looked at it and felt peaceful again. All the ugly feelings were now outside of me on that canvas and I could breathe again. Art is cathartic.
NB: My very old pieces do not have work-in-progress photos. Sorry!
