Dreams of Colour

A few days ago I dreamed of colours. Whether I was actually asleep and dreaming, or I had just woken up and having the first dreamy and fuzzy thoughts of the day, I'm not sure. But I'll call it a dream. I was reminding myself to paint with some colours I had generally not used a great deal previously. First there was a light lilac, and it was very opaque and dominant. Second, a strong green, like British Racing Green, also dominant, but working with the lilac in a partnership of roughly equal surface coverage. 

I kind of thought about this on and off during the day while pottering about in and out of the studio, and decided to have a go with the dream colours the next morning. After a clean up, and using oil paints as usual, I mixed up a pale lilac from Cobalt Violet Light and Titanium White and began work on two or three smallish paintings, one new and two other old paintings so bad it didn't matter what mess I made. The green was a Permanent Light Green. These two main colours were tempered with dark brown and yellow, and some smaller areas of bright red, orange and white. The browns were made from Van Dyke Brown and Burnt Umber, with a touch of Payne's Grey. This was like a new beginning for me and the morning went quite well, with signs of a breakthrough, so I determined  to continue and see how it might go.

Problems of course were immediately in evidence. Where to put the lilac, the brown and the green? The abstract painter does not have the guidelines or crutches of the figurative painter. There are no shapes to observe and imitate, no colours to observe and imitate, so to find interesting and creative shapes and beautiful colours and combinations of colours, from scratch is hard, and means that the painter, much more than if he was painting a still life or landscape from observation, needs to be inventive from the start. It's a mindset. In painting generally, throughout the centuries shape or form normally comes first, before colour, which is often secondary to the draughtsmanship, and can be changed later. For me the shapes are not crutches for the colour, or coat hangers on which to hang garments of colour on, nor are the colours just fillings for pre-determined shapes. They are in search of their own shapes and shape. To digress slightly, much of the eye-catching stuff on Instagram is vague in structure with not much of what we might call draughtsmanship, or defined and committed shapes. The vagueness seems an evasion much of the time.

Even though I have been working in the abstract for a while now, the problems remain huge, especially when not searching for a style which would allow for repeat, God forbid!

So, armed with my dream colours, lilac, green, dark brown etc., I set off on a painting spree next morning, and for three days. As I said, I re-worked three older paintings, and feeling very violent towards them I painted, scraped off and moved the colours about. These were 30x40 cm. Then I began  two new paintings, a bit bigger, on new canvases. It was hard work as usual for a 78 year old, but I like what was happening. It was a process, a process which had to be gone through - two steps forward, one step back - and leading somewhere. The activity was written and visible on the surfaces of the paintings, and about one hundred cotton buds fulfilled their destinies in the process. I now have five paintings I'm calling finished. Here they are. Click on them for detailed views.