MOVE IT
50 x 66 cm, oil on canvas board
I used to draw a lot of comics. There were pages and pages of the stuff. Sometimes, when I didn't feel like painting bananas or scary gods I would go looking through the comics for panels that could be colorized and hung on walls.
My
first attempt at 'Move it' was in Tokyo in 1998 and I never finished it
because I didn't know what I was doing. I got stuck at a midway because I couldn't imagine the next step, much less the final product.
See, that's no good. I even put it above the dart board because I didn't care if it got hit and I thought it might distract my opponents. Anyways, I was going through old photos recently and spotted the pink and orange and thought, "distorted and from a great distance it doesn't look so bad." The colors were interesting, and I didn't suck so much as a composer of images - a couple of years of sketching from life and movies really helped, there. I had a canvas board that was just the right size and nobody was around to stop me, so I went for it. I'm glad I did. My wife? Not so much.
With these kind of paintings I like to do an underdrawing in acrylics: it dries quickly, so you can make adjustments and then get on with the oils. The hues of the acrylics differ from their oil counterparts, adding variety. Sometimes I'll do the preliminary sketch and think, "looks good! maybe I'll just leave it like that." Not with this one. I mean, I could hang it on a wall and tell people it's finished and see how honest they will be with me. I have done it, actually, and now I think it wasn't such a nice thing to do.
What's it about? With this kind of painting I prefer to let the viewer's brain make up their own story. I like to think that a good painting can be "read" again and again and can take on different meanings for an individual over time. But there are a few visual clues as to what I was thinking when I drew the comic, and if pressed I could talk for a long, long (yawn!) time about extra layers of suggestive imagery I put into the painting. For me, it's just really fun to hang a big, bright pink thing on the wall.
(July 2021)