I’ve often heard artists say they don’t use black paint. They say black doesn’t occur in nature. I like to use black. It’s graphic. It may not occur in nature, but it occurs in my paintings. My paintings aren’t nature, even if they make you think of trees, animals and landscapes. I can describe something visual with words. I can also describe it with paint or ink. Words and images are language that describe other things, and let us share information about what we’ve seen or felt.
I painted in my studio today. I mixed some dark brown color to start with, and I made the shapes of trees against a large field of blue. Then I added yellow to it, and it became a shade of green that still had the brown in it. I painted for a while (the painting was pretty big), and when that green started getting low, I added more yellow to it. Then I had a brighter green, but it was still made of the green I had used before, which was still made of the brown I started with. When the green got too bright, I knocked it back with some red, and just kept going. I used the same brush, and just kept adding different colors to the mix I had been using all along. This way, the colors shared something. They were partly made of the same paint, which I added in dots of color, my version of pointillism.
That paint cup made me think of a cooking show I saw about an authentic molé sauce that the chef just kept adding to over years. It had elements that had been simmering in the mixture for a long, long time. When I found myself painting with a dusky purple, I knew it still contained some of the original brown and yellow… and I thought of black, and how people like to make rules that they want everyone else to follow.
My mind wanders all over the place when I paint.
If I paint a scene of trees, people sometimes say, “where are the fish?” If I paint trees with fish in them, then people say “do you have one without the fish?” And so I realized that if you want the painting to be different, you really want a different painting. If I haven’t done the painting that you want, then you should look somewhere else, or paint it yourself. I’m not going to paint from your perspective.
The cool thing about being human is that we share so much. We see and feel a lot of the same things. When I tell you about my experiences, you might say “Yes! That exact thing happened to me!” or you might say “You’re describing what I have always felt, but I didn’t know how to put it into words.”
When I make a painting that you can relate to, or you like so much that you want to put it on your wall and see it every day, it’s because we’re made of the same stuff. Like the paint, or the molé, there are bits of me coursing through your veins, and I have molecules of you sparking in my brain, or controlling my fingers.
Just go back far enough, and you will see that we are related. We are all connected, even if one of us is bright green and another of us is dusky purple.
