Composition with a small, square canvas.
I bought 4 canvases recently, 50cm^2, white and beautiful, staring at me from across the room with a sad look. They look sad because I have no idea what to do with them, I don’t want to ruin their crisp whiteness or their perfect symmetry with clumsy strokes of my pallet knife or brush. I want them to be great but I find myself hopelessly unprepared.
The reason for my unpreparedness comes from my lack of experience and a certain lack of playfulness. For me, a crisp, heavily weighted piece of nice paper is not an effective medium to express ideas because I feel pressured to do that beautiful paper justice. A lined piece of exercise paper though? Perfect for my ideas and experiments, but no more than that.
As a budding creative technologist, this behavior is not very desirable, sticking to techniques where failures can be minimized and never taking stylistic risks will get me nowhere and teach me nothing; sticking to the status quo will not push the limits of my creativity.
This brings me to those canvases; I’ve never worked on small, square canvas. It scares me to not have scale as my wow factor as in Waxed Furious (120x120cm). It scares me to not have the golden ratio as in many other pieces, Decay being one. What do I do with these small, irritating windows of white and how do I push my creativity beyond what is comfortable?
I bought 4 canvases recently, 50cm^2, white and beautiful, staring at me from across the room with a sad look. They look sad because I have no idea what to do with them, I don’t want to ruin their crisp whiteness or their perfect symmetry with clumsy strokes of my pallet knife or brush. I want them to be great but I find myself hopelessly unprepared.
The reason for my unpreparedness comes from my lack of experience and a certain lack of playfulness. For me, a crisp, heavily weighted piece of nice paper is not an effective medium to express ideas because I feel pressured to do that beautiful paper justice. A lined piece of exercise paper though? Perfect for my ideas and experiments, but no more than that.
As a budding creative technologist, this behavior is not very desirable, sticking to techniques where failures can be minimized and never taking stylistic risks will get me nowhere and teach me nothing; sticking to the status quo will not push the limits of my creativity.
This brings me to those canvases; I’ve never worked on small, square canvas. It scares me to not have scale as my wow factor as in Waxed Furious (120x120cm). It scares me to not have the golden ratio as in many other pieces, Decay being one. What do I do with these small, irritating windows of white and how do I push my creativity beyond what is comfortable?