Eratica (2016)

I’ve run into a bit of a brick wall on the Tarot Fool piece. Basically, I’m choking on the need for redrawing the piece when I did such a nice job of it the first time around. I know I can do better, and will, but my brain keeps crying foul. So, I decided I needed to clear my head of some other ideas that I’d been holding off on, just to break the logjam and get something done in the meantime, until I rediscover the urge to draw a two-by-three foot tarot card again.

An idea I had that was borne of a previous, fairly successful abstract assemblage, called Oblique Strategies. It’s a nice piece, and it has an interesting effect on people… until they see Breakthrough, and forget all about Oblique Strategies. I asked myself, what if I did a larger version, with more panels? The problem of making it larger not only called for a larger wooden panel, but also larger canvas boards, and a larger splatter box. By some serendipity, the recent purchase of a laser printer afforded me a larger box that was just big enough for the job I had in mind (once I reclaimed it from the cats). I also knew I could find larger canvas board panels at the place I bought the panels from the original painting. But I also knew that the quality of the panel boards is somewhat sketchy, with the dimensions being a bit skewed from panel to panel. I demoed a layout with the black boxes in the corner, and kind of liked the look of it on the bare wood panel, but knew it might seem a bit dark. So when I started to plan for the painting proper, I accidentally-on-purpose reversed the order of the panels, and just the placing of the white in the corners seemed to open up the painting a little more than I would have imagined. So I went to work.

The actual layout and painting phase took me a couple of hours, tops, but the preliminary planning took me hours more, over a period of a couple of days. The piece took a little over a day to completely dry and cure, and then the gluing phase took me another painstaking hour or so, as I discovered my lines had been obliterated by the layer of crimson ‘stain’ I’d applied to the wooden panel, and had to rework it by eye and hand. It’s not quite as perfect as I’d originally hoped, but it has an organic flow to it that satisfies my eye, perhaps even more than the straight lines had.

So here is the piece:

ERATICA (2016)

MEANING:
This piece is about how it feels to need something so bad, your normal reactions and processes become skewed by that need, provoking impulsive and erratic behaviour.

DETAILS:
Abstract Assemblage (Abstract Expressionism); Acrylic on canvas board mounted on wood panel; 24″ x 24″.
Asking price: $1000.00 CAD (+s/h)
Serious offers: leeATclearvisionstudiosDOTnet