From Inspiration Through Process: How a Series of Abstract Paintings Came to Be
You’ll find the Sundrops and other mostly yellow paintings in the Hello, Yellow collection.
Embracing colour
What’s your favourite colour?
As a young child, without reservation my favourite colour was yellow. While the other little girls preferred pink or perhaps purple, the sunniest of colours was what I loved: Bright and saturated, warm and cheerful, yellow.
When I was quite small, my parents moved to a big old house with a neglected but beautiful flower-filled backyard garden. Making mud pies with cool damp earth under the sunny canopy of an overgrown forsythia bush may be when my love of yellow began.
But as it happened, the overgrown forsythia came down, I grew older, became a serious child, and my tastes changed. Although the memory of my once favourite has stayed, I lost touch with yellow in the art that I made as more sober colours and colour combinations appeared.
Yellow hasn’t featured much at all in the work that I’ve made over the last decade. Perhaps a splash as an accent but not often. That is, until very recently when I began a journey to create yellow paintings.
Dabbling in yellow with four small paintings.
So why the shift to making yellow paintings then?
At the time of my shift back to yellow I was in the middle of a 100 day project, working with sepia toned found papers and a colour palette of mostly neutrals with hints of greens and blues.
While working on this project thoughts of yellow began to nudge at the corners of my attention. That nudge kept getting stronger and stronger, so much so, that the sepia pages and sober neutrals were set aside and I began formulating a plan for making yellow paintings.
The switch to making yellow paintings began as the daffodils poked their heads up from the ground to brave the cool spring air. As it happened I was on a simplifying quest at the same time. Paring down the palette of paintings to a single hero colour may have come from a desire to simplify my palette.
The catalyst towards yellow might also have come from a conversation I had around the same time with another artist. She said to me, and I'm paraphrasing, that she only uses colours that she likes. Seems straightforward enough, right? As strange as it sounds, I haven't always done that.
This comment called to mind that I once loved yellow and that perhaps I needed more of my favourite childhood colour in my life and my art. Yellow is happy and joyful and I wanted that in my art as well.
Whatever the reason might have been, whether it was the springtime blooms, a desire to simplify my palette, a motivating conversation or a gentle nudge from within me that grew more insistent, I began to make yellow paintings.
Genesis
The yellow paintings began with a group of six small square paintings that I love to this day. I called them the Sundrops series. The ease with which they came together is one of the happiest memories I have in the studio. The Sundrops paintings were a turning point in my practice and became a defining influence on the work that I’ve made since and aspire to make in the future.
Intention
My intention with the paintings that became the Sundrops series was simply to make yellow paintings: Paintings that could not be mistaken for anything other than yellow paintings.
And yet I knew that I didn't want a canvas covered only in yellow, although that could be an interesting challenge. While a single colour painting has its appeal too, for me, right now, that just isn’t enough. I needed other colours to play with yellow, while letting yellow shine in all her glowing glory.
Process
The six paintings of the Sundrops series each began the same way with the pristine white canvases painted over in a most unappealing muddy grey. It was a very ugly beginning but deliberately done. I needed something to respond to on the canvas and I knew that there would be no reservations in covering the grey in the subsequent passes made on the paintings.
The grey was quickly covered with an assortment of other colours that were anything but grey and not yellow either. I wanted colours that were going to be a colourful underpainting with a story to tell even though I knew much of the colour would also be covered up as the painting continued to take shape.
Next came the addition of dark lines made using a water soluble coloured pencil. The lines were drawn across the surface of the painting meandering and crossing making abstract shapes.
Quickly applying water soluble pencil scribbles to a small abstract painting.
Then once an interesting background of colours had been laid down, colours that were on either side of yellow on the colour wheel were added: Orange and Green. They were near yellow but not yellow. I knew that as I was painting colours that weren’t yellow and drawing dark lines, that also weren’t yellow, that much of this work would invariably get covered up. But some parts would remain and add to the composition as a whole. That is part of my process.
I don’t know where I’m going when working this way or what the outcome might be but trust in the process is key.
For someone like me, who in other aspects of life likes to have a plan, structure and organization, it’s an entirely different way of thinking. It’s as if the process takes over and I am just there to follow along.
When the painting was rich with colour and line, it was time to add daubs of yellow. It didn’t matter to me what shade or tint of yellow I was using in the beginning, just that I had a variety.
The first passages of yellow added to the canvases.
Various sizes of brushes were used for making these abstract paintings. One of my favourite brushes was a very inexpensive brush with splayed bristles. It made marks that couldn’t be easily controlled allowing some unpredictability into the marks made with it. Mark making tools, dragged through the wet paint, were used to add subtle visual texture and more line.
As the process continued and more and more of the canvas was covered in yellow I became more aware of the kind of yellow I was choosing. Did a section need a dark yellow shaded with black or perhaps a pale yellow tinted with white was in order? Was a cool yellow needed, or perhaps a warm one?
Was the painting asking for opaque yellow to cover what was already there or a transparent yellow to allow something from below to show through?
As more variations in yellow began to cover the canvas, what remained of the other colours put down in previous layers were only pockets. I held on loosely to these small areas knowing that keeping some (but not all of them) would add a contrasting element to yellow and in the final compositions these small patches would help lead the eye around the paintings.
Finishing
My guiding concept throughout the process was that these were destined to be yellow paintings. When questioning what was the next step in the process I always came back to this idea. Using dark colours like navy and deep teal helped to simplify areas that weren’t yellow (the pockets of colour mentioned earlier) and to provide a dark tonal contrast to the areas that were yellow.
Then as if by magic, as if the painting was leading me and not the other way around, the yellow paintings emerged as a harmonious variety of yellow on the canvas: From deep, almost caramel coloured to the palest of yellows verging on white; fully saturated, out of the tube sunflower and canary living happily alongside more subtle variations of desaturated colours like Dijon and ecru.
The Sundrops informing other yellow paintings.
I loved the time spent in my studio with the happiest of colours. The paintings, while abstract, feel organic and lively like the blooms of the forsythia of my childhood.
The Sundrops paintings are among my favourite works to date. They were the beginning of a months long exploration of the colour yellow and are part of a larger collection of sunny paintings entitled Hello, Yellow.
All of the yellow paintings have been generous teachers tutoring me about myself and my process. They will continue, I hope in their generosity to guide my work in the art studio for a while yet.
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