Civility. with Inspiration and a Bit of a New Direction

Civility. started very far from where it finished. The initial idea was a portrait of a prisoner in stereotypical stripes...the clothing being painted on the back of the glass with the face, hands and other details on the front side of the glass,  creating a strange depth between the clothes and the person...it was to be a vertical composition and began with a simple layer of black and white stripes covering the entire surface (none of which can still be seen)...that did not last long...

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The piece wasn't working out and I kept feeling like I had done this before...not this particular subject in this particular way...but the second I had a body outlined, I felt like i was rehashing the many single-subject-oriented pieces I've been doing lately....

 

I just wasn't excited.

Then I saw the piece above from Jean Michel Basquiat and immediately was drawn to the "confused depth" of the piece...you get a sense of a landscape, of a deep field of view, yet different objects, colors, and marks confuse the scale and relationships within the piece.

Instead of a subject and background...I wanted the two to work together and trade-off being the subject and detail...my first piece of the weekend worked this out to a smaller extent...

http://marionart23.blogspot.com/2013/10/i-dreamt-of-dogs-leaving-in-night-new.html

you still have a subject and a background but the lines moving between the two, the marks that lead the eye across the piece, and the lack of definition around the subject all create this somewhat confused sense of depth and importance. The subject is obviously standing out...but to a much lesser extent than the previous examples...

It's a recent change in my work that, I think, is improving the final product. Instead of always relying on a strong central subject, some of my recent work has relied much more on all aspects of the composition, creating new and unexpected color relationships, confusion of depth, and an overall energy that moves effortlessly throughout the canvases...