The year of painting dangerously

Still Life (30 cms x 22 cms acrylic and coloured pencil 2016)

I’m preparing, mentally at least, for something I’ve wanted to do for some time – a three-day still life workshop with Katie Sollohub at the Seawhite Studios. For years I’ve looked wistfully at their website and Facebook pages, at students smeared in charcoal and paint having a wonderful time and breaking through their limiting beliefs.

I clutch on to a number of limiting beliefs: that I can’t paint, that I can’t do anything on a scale larger than A3, that I don’t know how to use certain media. Some of these, I hope, will be challenged and possibily even dispelled at the end of this month. It’ll be wonderful to work with an artist like Katie Sollohub whose style is loose and free and very different to my own. I’m also hoping to work with multi-media artist Doug Selway soon, again exploring aspects of painting that I would find difficult to confront on my own.

Why all this sudden activity? Well, you can only tell yourself stories for so long before they become real. As we learned from the poem I posted last week, one must ‘keep changing, you just get more who you really are‘. I am, I hope, someone who can paint without inhibitions, without the limits I seem to want to impose upon myself. It was time to paint ‘dangerously’.

The picture above – although small in scale – is a product of such abandon. I’d made a mess of something and had lots of unused acrylic paint left over. Without first drawing or sketching out a composition, without even setting up a still life group, I used up the spare paint and just made it up as I went along. The result is no masterpiece but neither is it completely worthless (and it was fun to do because there were no expectations and no borders to fear).

Watch this space…

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