I thought it might be fun to take one of my new pieces and show the development over last summer that I did, step by step because each painting that I work on goes through a LOT of changes. And I think it’s important to document those changes.
So here’s the first piece I choose from last summer’s works, “French Teal.” (interested in the original or art print? click here).
It certainly has become an integral part of my work as I paint myself, I seem to constantly take photos of my artwork in each stage because it helps me so much to make decisions about the next step. Because I don’t have a big studio by any means (in my basement currently), I cannot “step back” to “see” the entire picture. And the larger I work the harder it becomes to see the big picture.
So photos definitely help me look at the painting in different ways. I can also go back and see all the changes and how far I’ve really come in those decisions. It’s very helpful to my process.
This work above, “French Teal” is one of my new paintings that is relatively large, 30”x30”.
I love to work in a square format since that lends itself to the most opportunities in an abstract sense. I can rotate and rotate and rotate it around and it seems to have more options in the square format. Portrait is vertical, so that lends itself to a “person” feeling. Landscape is horizontal and that also has that “landscape” feel to it. So there’s restrictions or constructs even within the shape that I start with from the very beginning.
My first photo of this piece is this image (even though I thought I had taken a slightly earlier one of this painting right before the white area). These early stages I have been working with stencils in this series of works, so I started with the stencils in the first layer for this piece (instead of adding it much later in other pieces). I also love to use the stencil and “reuse” it and “reuse” it without adding paint. I feel it lends itself to a more abstract and imperfect mark-making process - using the stencil like a brush (which I do a lot in my latest works either a stencil or a stenciled roller etc). The pattern “breaks” up and I’m left with marks as the leftover paint is transferred back on the surface on top of each other etc.
There’s a lot of steps I skipped actually (sometimes I take photos of each layer) but between the first photo and this photo, I already “decided” what I was going to do. A Lot of times I take photos when I’m not sure what my next step might be & the photos help me visualize.
So I took couple different stencil motifs to weave in together the stencil patterns and (what I call) “freestyle painting” which is my organic, abstract mark-making painterly marks.
After adding more organic elements, I decided to jump in and create that white” space because the blue was already getting a little “heavy” to me. But in this next step, you can see that I did not want to create a sharp separation of one big white area layering on top of the teal blue area full of organic elements. I have already explored that strategy quite extensively in my Window Series & Tablecloth Series in my graduate work.
Here I start to “blend” and layer on the white stenciled work into to build multiple layers of teal and white to unify the entire piece.
I also wanted to build layers within the white space itself. So there’s starting to be a bridge between those 2 spaces in this piece.
As you can see, each photo can be rotated into a different view which also helps me as I work through the painting process. Here, I added some purple wash to create a little more dimension. White is a very “forward” color that “pops” out. It also can create a kind of blank feel and one of my favorite tendencies in painting is to always find how I can create more texture into my work. Building the wash organically pulls some white elements forward naturally and pushed them also back into space with the wash.
Another view as I added darker purple areas to the piece. I tend to take more photos of each layer as I know the piece is starting to be finished. I say this all the time in my process, but the beginning is bursting with all sorts of decisions, 100’s even that feels very freeing (sometimes intimidating) but hardly anything can go “wrong” in that space. There’s really no mistakes.
As the piece moves toward feeling more and more finished, each decision is more weighted for me. Any decision can completely change the balance of the piece and it will either “finish” it for me, or make it so that I see the next one or two steps to work towards finishing.
The end of the piece is a constant balance of testing a few marks or decision or whatever, and stepping back to see how it feels and fits into the total. And then leaving it for few days or perhaps weeks, to see if it “sits” well.
“French Teal,” acrylic, chalk paint on canvas, 30”x30”, 2018.
Copyright All Rights Reserved Kathryn Neale Studio.
And finally the finished piece. After I added couple organic washes of “copper” to pop few areas and then also added some pure white patterned motif in the “white” area for added layering