A series of successful experiments culminates in a failed painting.

I think I painted this last week, approximately.  It's been something of a blur lately, with everything going on.   Sometimes, I end up with something I will never put on display, because it's essentially meaningless and falls significantly short of my standard of beauty, but which I will also never paint over, because I don't dare forget the lessons learnt.

With this one, I was playing around with a couple of things.  First off- the pink.  Normally, I only use the three factory-mixed primaries, black and white (what I call my Basic 5).  I used to work a lot with custom-tinted paint back in the day, but the liquid colourants they use at the store behave in a fundamentally different way than the powdered pigments they use at the factory, so I discontinued their use years ago when I started standardizing my materials.

However- the last time I was at the store to pick up some paint, I happened to spy a few cans of mistinted Larcoloid (the only paint I'll ever really love) being sold at a hefty discount.  There were two quarts of slightly different bluish-greens and a gallon of this fantastic pink, and all three of them colours I can't quite duplicate with my Basic 5.  And at $5.00/qt and $10.00/gal, I almost felt like I was stealing them when I cashed out at the register.

This panel started off basically as a place for me to push a ton of this pink paint around with a squeegee and experiment with laying other colours and combinations of colours over it to get a sense of the relative density of the colourants.  This way I could figure out how to incorporate the pink into other works without too many unexpected consequences.

Also, I wanted to see how the paint (in general, not just the pink), would behave if I created areas of very different depths in the paint.  Normally on a canvas, the weight of the paint forces everything to pool slightly toward the center, but I'd noticed that on these birch panels I'm using pretty often now the paint seems to stay put better, and I wanted to push that envelope a little.  How much paint could I pool up in one place without it sliding around past where I'd put it into areas of very thinly-applied paint?

At some point in the process, as usually happens, I got a little distracted.  This is often a good thing, especially with these sorts of experimental meanderings.  In fact, I generally try to create a situation in which I have a few different kinds of stimuli to keep me from thinking too much about what I'm doing.  On a really good day, I can have Pandora playing from the netbook, a CD in the stereo, a little spillover from Meghan's headphones and whatever song she's got cranked up on single-track repeat while she's writing, sidewalk construction outside, making the floor vibrate intermittently in delayed-reaction staccato to the cracking of jackhammers on concrete, the smells of cigarette smoke, hot, aromatic coffee with too much sugar, and last night's glass of bourbon next to the sink all competing for my attention.  This overstimulation seems to have the dual effect of increasing the possibility both that I won't get too obsessed with any one particular detail and also that I'll accidentally do something I hadn't planned for. 

What happened here was a really cool accident with that yellow you see toward the center.  I had mixed the yellow with a tiny bit of black and drizzled it over a particularly large pool of relatively deep pink and black.  Then I took a large squeegee, which still had a little of the pink paint on it, and dragged the pink and black from the top to the bottom of the panel, figuring it would mix the yellow into the pool and create some interesting streaks.  But instead, the yellow disappeared completely.  I had inadvertently wrapped the yellow up in a pocket of pink and black, like a bubble. 

So I stood there and stared at it for a while, waiting to see if the yellow would seep up back to the surface, as can sometimes happen.  It didn't.  This was totally unprecedented.  Awesome.  But of course, who fucking cares if there's a bubble of paint hidden down there where no one can see?  So I popped the bubble.  I took one of my larger brushes, and basically slapped it.  The yellow shot out, twirling slightly in the air, pulling some of the black along with it, and then splashed back down on the surface.  Then little air bubbles started to burble up, creating a really fun texture.

The blue and white up top, with the black "V" in the corner was a series of inquiries about working subtractively and then re-filling voids to get simple concise lines.  That worked out fairly well too.

So now I've got a better sense of how the pink will behave with the rest of my palette, I know that I can pool the paint up significantly deeper on a wooden panel than a canvas one, I've learnt a bit more about this additive/subtractive thing I've been playing with for a while, and I discovered a cool trick I'll want to try to recreate again later.  Was it because of the pink, or can I do that with any combination of colours?

However, the painting itself isn't particularly appealing.  The composition is a little trite and cheesy, and there's as much much emotional depth as there was emotional input (zero).  Most of the time when a painting ends up this way, it goes into the "to be painted over" pile under my workbench.  Not this one though.  It'll never see a gallery, but I'll keep it on my wall to remind me what I've learnt.