Gentle Breeze

I call this painting, Gentle Breeze.

Like some of my previous paintings, this painting has taken a little bit longer then anticipated but, as always, the finished piece has been worth the extra work. I actually started this painting over my summer vacation shortly after I finished my painting, Ocean Wave, but I've only recently been able to finish it due to some difficulty I was experiencing with the painting. It didn't turn out exactly the way I wanted it to but I'm still happy with what I ended up with. It was an experiment and as an artist I believe that the key to growing creatively is by experimenting with new things and seeing how far I can take something that I'm already familiar with.

The intention behind my paintings is always to see what I can make other people feel and think of whenever someone sees one of my paintings. It's always interesting to me to hear what other people think of one of my paintings because what one person might see and feel in painting is almost always completely different then to the eyes of another.

What made this painting different though was that I tried to see if I could purposely try and stimulate a specific emotion or idea in the beholder by using certain colors and forms. In this case, the colors I used were mostly greens and the forms I used were mostly swirls and spirals. The specific feelings and emotions that I was aiming for, as always, will be left open to the imagination to interpret. I try my best not to influence whatever the beholder interprets from the painting by prescribing any specific ideas beyond just a title that I feel fits with the painting.

The process for this painting was frustrating but it could simply be a case of what happens when an young artist tries to work through their first creative block. As I mentioned before, I started this painting shortly after I finished my last painting, Ocean Wave, over the summer. During the process of my last painting I was experiencing a lot of creative block at the time, which I also talked about in the post I made for it, and after I finished it I was still experiencing some creative block. As an artist I've never really experienced a creative block before so this feeling was still new to me when I was starting this painting. I didn't know what what to do about the creative block I was experiencing so I decided to try and work through it because I didn't want it to interfere with the commitment I was now putting into my dream of being a true artist. I had reached a point where I wanted to get more serious about my art work and my dream as an artist by trying to be more consistent with my paintings and putting more work into how often I worked on my paintings. When I started this painting I knew I wanted to experiment with what kinds of feelings I could purposely stimulate in other people by using certain colors but I didn't know what kind of forms or colors I wanted to use. I decided that I would try to work with green again but I was running very low on my good vibrant green paint that came in little tubes so I knew that I was going to have to use my paint sparingly. I was down to only two tubes of dark and lime green paint and with two more as backups in case I didn't have enough or I accidentally made a big mistake. Mostly I tried to use up what was left of an old jar of gooey green paint I had. There wasn't much of it either so I did everything I could to plan something out before I started so that way I could save as much paint as possible.

After I planed the colors and forums I wanted to use and lightly sketched everything out with a pencil I began to have trouble while I was painting. It started out as a few small mistakes but after a while if I make too many mistakes on a canvas and I keep repainting over and over on something the canvas starts to loose texture because there's so much paint layered on to it. This is what I really wanted to avoid because I had this problem with last painting also. The reason why this is so frustrating for me is because once this happens to a canvas it then becomes increasingly more difficult to blend colors together without a rough surface to grab onto the paint. Long story short, this is why it took me a while to finish this painting. After I realized that I had made this mistake I knew it was going to be difficult to get the effects I wanted and I kind of kept putting it off because I didn't want to deal with it. I feel like the colors are a little more washed out then I would have liked but I did my best with what I had and to me that's what matters most.

Sometimes I like to try new things and experiment with something I've never done before. Sometimes I discover something new by experimenting with new things and sometimes I end up experimenting with something a little too much, but I've always believed that rather I succeed or fail, the point of continuing to experiment and try new things is to learn and grow from whatever I end up with. I'm still not entirely sure about "creative block" but I think maybe in the future I'll try taking a break between paintings the next time I experience a creative block.

Now let's make another one!

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Title: Gentle Breeze

Medium: Acrylic Paint

Year: 2017

Original Painting: For Sale