The Creative Pursuit: Experimentation

Although I am currently working on a "larger" work, I am ever mindful of the Daily Painting initiative and the benefits to be gained by working and completing smaller works each day to experiment, stretch, draft an idea, or review the basics on a frequent, repetitive basis. Most of the Artists who have committed to the daily effort have cited the benefits including the building of a portfolio for creating and offering a more affordable art market and to build a personal genre. Currently, my work efforts are characterized as Spurts and Bursts. Although I have not yet committed myself to a formal endeavor in the Daily Painting venue, it is ever present in my thinking to be sure. For me, there are sketches, research, reading, along with the actual work on Artifacts in the course of daily living.

Part of the Experimentation towards the current larger work is included below, an adaptation and evolution from this week's earlier post regarding Dante's Inferno. In the Canto VII, at Virgil's request, Plutus, the god of material wealth, dissappears into thin air. The strolling observers watch noisy Hoarders and Spendthrifts rolling huge weights at one another. The poets discuss Fortune's distribution of temporal riches.

 "Not causeless is this journey to the abyss; Thus is it willed on high...." Dante's Inferno Canto VII, lines 12-13

Original Art: From Dante's Divine Comedy: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise

Wealth and Fortune - The Transient Riches - Study 02  Souvenir of Dore

Copyright James E. Martin 2012

There are attributes that I like and don't like about this small Study. I like the feeling. I like the contrast. I like the background. In isolation, I like the color of the sack of gold. I like the position and posture of the person rolling the wealth up the hill. I like the highlight and flow of the hair. The body tone is an experiment with the blue of depression and the red of muscular effort but I don't think I will use it in the larger work. The dark outline of forms is a trial and has been used by other and greater Artists than I. I have never used it before. It works OK here in the Study but I probably won't retain it in the larger work. I want to continue experimentation on the body tones compared to the sack tones in the overall context. This Study was an experiment in the blue and gold mindful of my ever present love of Van Gogh's palette which was my earliest intuitive approach for this content. I am not yet convinced of obtaining the overall effect I am aiming for at the date of this oil sketch. Within a day, I had matured my approach to the blending method used in the foreground colors in the exposition of the larger work to a degree to which I was pleased and reminiscent of Renoir.

As I exhibit this Study today, I am mindful of the earlier blog on the Apollinaire-Matisse interview:

• "I found myself or my artistic personality by looking over my earliest works. They rarely deceive. There I found something that was always the same and which at first glance I thought to be monotonous repetition. It was the mark of my personality which appeared the same no matter what different states of mind I happened to have passed through." [Matisse]

• "But this took place at its own good time." [Apollonaire]

• "I made an effort to develop this personality by counting above all on my intuition and by returning again and again to fundamentals. When difficulties stopped me in my work I said to myself: 'I have colors, a canvas, and I must express myself with purity, even though I do it in the briefest manner by putting down, for instance, four or five spots of color or by drawing four or five lines which have a plastic expression.'" [Matisse]