"Ponder"

20x24x0.75, oil on canvas

I did this a few months ago. It was one of the early ones where I used a technique from my class with Melinda Cootsona: You start with abstraction and play with it until you find a figure. I find the playing really important, since it's when you apply paint intuitively, and it doesn't matter how it looks, so you're more free. You also get to experiment with marks, so you improve your painting vocabulary. Melinda likes to create more layers in her paintings before she finds the figure. I can see where that would add richness. I should do that. I guess I need more patience.

Here, I started with a painting that hadn't worked for me, then painted on that, so it had two layers under the figure. The earlier painting had had a chair with slats in it, and the paint had formed ridges. I kept those and liked how they overlapped the figure. (I later used this overlapping in another painting, posted earlier this month.) I'm also really enjoying the oil crayons. I like the scribbly texture.

I took a picture of the painting during development. You can see the random marks and drippies and scribbles. As I recall, I turned it in different directions while playing with it. And you can also see that I kept the large round shape in the upper left corner.