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Capriccio
42 x 42 Acrylic on canvas

How’s that for a tantalizing title! I didn’t know what to call this post because I didn’t know what I would write about when I started. I thought I’d try the stream-of-consciousness approach to see where it got me. So far I have the words but none of them are leading to anything.

It just occurred to me that this is how I start a painting. I put things on the surface, fill it up with colours and shapes and see where that takes me. You have to start somewhere. I’m not original in this approach. It’s fairly common for many abstract artists to start working this way. Some people call it “activating the canvas”. I find with abstract work you can’t really start with too much of a big plan because that plan ends up unravelling pretty quickly. There’s not much spontaneity in a plan. At most I might decide on a colour theme but even that can change very quickly.

It makes it sound like there’s no thought at all in abstract work but the fact is the thinking happens as you go, not before. You have to keep your options open so that you can let happy accidents happen. You also have to recognize a happy accident when you see one. This can be a difficult thing for beginners, not so much the happy accident but what you do with it. Do you leave it and start working around it? Do you leave it and just ignore it for a while as if it isn’t there? Or, is it just so darned gorgeous you can’t live without it and, unfortunately, end up with a bad painting because the whole time, you were accommodating that gorgeous bit and lost sight of the big picture? Sort of like a bad relationship that lasts longer than it should.

We’ve all been there, I’m convinced of it. The ideal ending to this scenario, and of any painting, really, is if you can manage to make the whole thing look like a happy accident. kind of like this post!

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