This is the second painting in a series of artworks I am currently exploring that I am now calling ‘Dualism’. The subject in the painting is a fellow artist friend of mine called Kunjan, who kindly posed for the picture. During this painting I became increasingly undecided about how to approach the background. Usually I tend to paint an abstraction of painterly brushstrokes to compliment the subject, but I felt this was not enough and I needed to find another solution.
The answer came through the weekly art classes I run where we were looking at colour and composition. We played with ideas such as the Rule of Thirds and the Golden Ratio to work out the relationship and balance within the artworks.
Sometimes answers just appear from right under your own nose as it was after a session talking to the group about the creative transitions of the artist Piet Mondrian that I realised my experience as a Graphic designer in previous years became more apparent. I loved the geometric shapes and lines within Mondrians work which created space, balance and aesthetic, sometimes helping with designs and page layouts.
I never really thought about combining this within my paintings before, so rather than seeing it as a separate entity, I combined both processes into dualistic forms. This raised further questions about my creative practice and the wider subject of how we define creativity in particular. The clues to this have been uncovered in the art classes that I run for beginners and improvers, which have been extremely beneficial to both myself and everyone else who attends them. People come to the sessions to develop their own journey and I try my best to facilitate that and give them the space to allow a sense of freedom in their expression.
With this in mind, a lot of questions and exploration have come about from these sessions. I have been explaining with the use of historical context and experience to express that painting, drawing, printmaking etc, is a form of mark-making and not necessarily unique in their own forms, but words to describe a process. The distinction of genres in art can be problematic, especially for people developing their own creativity. We are constantly defined by language which can control our way of approach and thinking.
For example, watercolour painting. In my experiences people I have spoken to have their own depiction of what it may appear as. A highly detailed realistic harbour scene or landscape, several brush techniques used, working within grid systems, masking fluid, no pencil seen or used. While all of this is valid and a great way to create, I feel it should also be seen as one of many ways which should come down to the individuals trial and error of making their mark. Of course there are some people who need guidance but also allowing them to try things out and make their own discoveries to be made that are just as valid as what has been set in stone in before us.
In some cases we are conditioned to think that through society there has to be a dominant way in which we view a certain creative discipline. I feel that this boundary needs to be blurred and allow ourselves to play with this in a form that is just as acceptable as something some people define as pure or proper.
Dualism is a concept and a process of defined opposites or maybe it could be a version of interchangeable moments, feelings or objects. I will try and go into more detail as this series of paintings develop.
This painting along with the previous one called ‘Tim’ have opened up new pathways into my personal creative development. I have also stripped back a lot of my learning with colour theory and recently started experimenting with different limited palettes, it is very exciting and I will share more of this soon with the start of my next painting. Creativity can be a contradictory environment sometimes, saying one thing and then doing another, backwards and forwards with varying ways to express. This is what I find interesting and occasionally overwhelming as everything is connected and always transitional.
