Back into abstraction

Between daily routines in approximately 2007-2012, I painted abstract. Then followed a figurative period. And now, seven years later, I plunge afresh into abstraction. This autumn I made three actually interconnected paintings, each of them based on a primary color. I focused on three things: color, form and ‘movement’. Movement is also rhythm. Thus I came upon ‘color rhythms’.

 

Elements

First I let the composition be determined for the greatest part by the four elements earth, water, fire and air.

Earth (gravity): slanting the canvas, whereby the wet acrylic starts streaming, meanwhile manipulating its direction by capsizing the canvas.

Water (strongly with water diluted acrylic): casting the paint over parts of the canvas; striking paint through the air; dripping the paint, meanwhile rocking or swaying the canvas.

Fire (sun): on the canvas falling sunlight makes ‘proposals’ for lighter and darker parts, and then selecting from that.

Air (wind): by alternately blowing the wet paint with the mouth or a foehn.

 

Top layers

Once ready with this (in fact traditional but complex formed) imprimatura, I started painting new layers on top of it in oil, which took me about five weeks. It was not until then that I started using brushes. The forms, colors and rhythms that emerged then, intervened adequately with the underpainting, and so surprisingly new structures toke shape. It was an exciting process. The final result for each painting I called Color rhythm.

Fragment from Color rhythm III