A change of scale from large canvases to smaller more considered works.
They are quieter paintings, with fewer bravura brushstrokes.
The gesture more contained and internal. The mood is quieter and more contemplative.
Instead of layering paint I am now using thick textures and then knocking them back with a palette knife while they are still malleable so the image almost disappears. Then working back in and drawing the image out again.
With a result the image becomes much more integrated with the ground, the tones become more integrated .
It’s a scary business almost losing an image you have worked on for some time. However you do need to move to a place where there is risk of losing everything, in the quest to find an unwilled image.
That thing they call effective surprise. Where unbidden things happen.
I like the sense of a painting being a transmogrification- something transformed with magical qualities.
The term Artists block implies something impeding progress or stopping up things.
Something that has to be got over or got around, But this term really fails to describe what happens or rather what fails to happen when you are not happy painting.
For me ,Things beckon and perhaps intrigue but the ideas don’t take, or if they do they lack that frisson of excitement and wonder at what has arrived on the canvas.
Its not that the relationship that you have with your subject fails its just that there is a bit of distance suddenly, because it is a relationship thing before anything else, between you and the painting and it takes a good deal of trust and belief in the work for that relationship to be vital Anne Lamott describes what actually artist block really is for her.
“The problem is acceptance, which is something we’re taught not to do. We’re taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.” ― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life