ça pète

7th Ave - unfinished

100x150cm

oil and spray paint on canvas

When someone asks me how I know a painting is finished, usually I say I don't know why, but I do know.  It is when something in the painting moves, flickers.  People think I'm kidding when I say this but then write it off because artists are all nuts.  We have the freedom to talk and walk with anyone unilaterally because we are unclassifiable. I love it.

When I was building portraits with clay -modeling not sculpting that's technically carving, I knew when I had captured the person because the eyes on the sculpture would blink. Usually after an hour or so.

Last week, during the rentré -when kids go back to school in France, I almost cut the above painting in half but instead I plodded on.  It's a pain in the arse.  Just do it, sit in that chair and paint, or stand there and paint.  I imagine it is like a writer trotting through the first draft of a long work of fiction.  Just sit down and do it, keep your butt in the chair. 

The result, in this case, is that this painting hops, not just a flicker but skipps.

Ça pète.

Here are some details

I love the abstraction of the blocking-in part.

This shows the mixture of spray paint coupled with alla prima oil technique.

Ça pète!