Since I returned from Ireland I been painting from imagination. I keep looking at photos of the trip, and they are lovely, but they are not really inspiring me to use one for a subject for a painting.
I seem to be drawn to scenes, memories, senses and sensations from the trip. I see colors in my mind and I see shapes and images. Sometimes I just see layers of images that I can’t separate.
Since the trip, although my paintings are abstract landscape paintings, my first three paintings contained scenes or some shapes that were easily recognizable like a cliff or an ocean setting. This time I wanted to do something different.
Given to Exaggerated Wonder, acrylic on canvas 24x30x1.5 inches.
I usually draw very little before I paint. I didn’t draw at all on this painting. It developed by first deciding on my palette, preparing a canvas with black gesso and then when that dried, I just started letting shapes and colors come from my imagination.
I was also using Golden Open gloss medium mixed with paint which allowed me to drag one color into another before they dried to form bands of color. In other words I was painting wet-on-wet.
I started at the bottom with darker blues and greens and then worked my way to the top letting the colors become lighter as I ascended. What a fun way to paint! I just kept a vision of Ireland in my mind. The memories and feelings both consciously and unconsciously informed what I was painting.
I was painting in a new way and it felt very creative. In my next painting that I will start on Monday, I will try it again—painting from imagination.
I like this quote that I found about creativity:
“Even those of us not in explicitly creative fields must come up with new ideas and insights in order to move ahead. How can we shake up the way we think? Creativity has been pegged to conducive environments, perfect collaborators, personality traits, serendipity, and even spiritual muses. While research psychologists are interested in increasing innovative thinking, clinical psychologists sometimes encourage patients to use artistic expression as a way to confront difficult feelings.”