This is a new abstract piece that evolved through several compositions. In fact, if layers could be lifted from the canvas, you'd find several different paintings. Even though it changed significantly as I worked and re-worked it, some of the original image remains. You can see an early stage
here.
While many of my abstract pieces often start out as formal experiments usually based primarily on shape, they often end up transformed by ideas and experiences I'm encountering while developing the artwork. It's as if these experiences fill and transform what began as an empty shell or skeletal structure. It's difficult to accept changes to the work as new directions suggest themselves, but eventually what started as mostly a simple compositional study becomes a resolved image filled with an idea. Finding resolution between elements of the composition and the idea is a struggle. There's always tension between what the intended outcome was and the new form almost imposing itself on the work.
As I was developing this image, I had also completed a larger, realistic image I entered in an exhibit. There were some leftover paper cutouts I had used as templates for wings within this realistic piece, and they provided a natural addition to my abstract painting, providing some relief for some of the softer shapes I had been working with.
At the same time, spring was transforming the environment around our home, and so colors and shapes I saw in plants, flowers, the spring sky and a robin's nest on our front porch somehow found their way into my painting, not in a literal sense but in stylized forms consistent with the image. My wife remarked it suggested to her the theme of creation, and what better deliverer of creation than springtime.
What I find interesting is the relationship between this painting and the realistic painting from which I was able to adopt some leftovers. The two side by side are amazingly different. In fact, you would probably not guess they had been produced by the same artist. But, there is this subtle relationship between the two created by the sharing of a simple shape. The idea that two completely different images are somehow related intrigues me.
This is a plein air painting I produced at an Agency Bay beach on Leech Lake, Walker, Minnesota. It was a beautiful Fourth of July weekend, and I couldn't help but get out in the morning to paint. I used lake water to thin the paint and clean my brushes, so there's some of the Minnesota lakes locked in the surface of the image!
