OMG No.1

This painting is inspired by a piece of Jackson Pollock’s called Summertime No.9A which is owned by the Tate Modern in London. It’s not supposed to be a copy it’s merely the inspiration behind the painting I have created. The one thing I love about this more than anything else is the expressiveness of the lines. In drip painting people often confuse randomness with control. By that I mean the ability to create art that looks like it has been thrown together in five minutes that has actually taken the exact opposite – much time spent practicing the arcs and sweeps of the wrist, paint viscosities, tools, heights, angles etc… Each application of paint is controlled and planned. The real skill in drip painting is to make something appear chaotic from a disciplined and rigid set of rules. In reality, when I get a typically uneducated response I actually take it as a huge compliment – Picasso once said that he spent his whole life trying to paint like a child – free from any influences that adulthood can impose. To better illustrate my point about composition you can see how the main strokes of paint are applied in a very linear and controlled way in the photograph underneath (which has been Photoshopped a bit to show how the painting is constructed)

It’s quite clear to see that the main applications of paint are relatively equidistant from each other, similar in size and regular in appearance. As an artist I need to control this to prevent the painting from becoming heavy and overburdened. You have to respect the canvas or it will bite you. I have given workshops on how to drip paint to people in the past and they are always staggered by how complex the technique is when you are stood there with a wooden stick in your hand. Every line, spot, drip, arc and daub has to be placed with care – and on this size of canvas that’s a lot of applications.

This is a very big painting, in fact, it’s somewhere over 12 feet long. This was a commission piece and it is not for sale.

OMG No.1 was so named as people’s reaction to seeing it for the first time is normally ‘Oh My God!’

This entry was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 12:25 pm. It is filed under Drip Paintings 2, See all paintings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.