I started painting over a decade ago – first in acrylics and then in oils. These two different paintings of pomegranates show a progression of my style and skill, but maybe not in the direction you think.
The first painting is crisp and precise. I was very much motivated to get it to ‘look real’. It’s good to be able to develop techniques over time to make paintings look more realistic, but for me there’s a limit. I don’t want my paintings to look like photographs, because they’re not. I enjoy the process of making something realistic but if it goes to far in that direction I feel like I haven’t expressed enough of myself in it.
The second pomegranate painting is much more expressive and less precise. While I definitely wanted it to look like a pomegranate, I also wanted it to look like a painting. So I was more expressive with my colour and brushstrokes. I didn’t do these paintings one after the other; they’re years apart, but I think they show a loosening of my style and a confidence in representing something in a more creative way.
The paintings I’m doing at the moment are very much in the middle between these two paintings. While I still like to paint things in a realistic style, I like to make sure that it’s not too realistic – and that could be by having a secondary colour showing through underneath a roughly-painted background, a complete lack of background detail, saturated colours, and colours that wouldn’t be there, to name a few examples.
And it might surprise you, but sometimes the details are the easiest part. In the painting below – Orontes Rd Markets, Yeronga, the more detail-heavy parts were the easiest - I think because there is just more content there to fill in. Meanwhile, the shadow and light in the foreground were challenging and took a few attempts to get just right. Sometimes the negative spaces, the low-detail areas are more difficult because there’s less to put there and so I have to work really hard to get the shapes, tone, and colour right.
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