While I Paint… Just a Kiss

While I Paint Just a Kiss

Occa­sion­ally I do a series of paint­ing in process pho­tos. To me it is enjoy­able to see how some­thing goes from an idea in my mind’s eye to con­vert­ing plain white can­vas into lay­ers of paint wrought with meaning.

I find it hard to talk about the why of the paint­ing. For me paint­ing is a word­less activ­ity. I am lost in a world of light, color, shapes, some­times sounds, but not words. Some­times short musi­cal seg­ments play end­lessly loop­ing in my head as the brush moves the paint around the can­vas. Whether I am paint­ing a bird or an abstrac­tion dur­ing the process there is no “bird” nor “word” nor line nor fig­ure. There is only color, hue, light, dark­ness, tex­ture, the sound of brush and paint mov­ing across the can­vas. Some­times there is music.

I begin this paint­ing hav­ing seen an image of a rather intri­cate crop cir­cle on Face­book. It strikes me that I might be able to cre­ate one of my knots, with an asym­met­ric ele­ment to see what kinds of sym­me­tries result from rep­e­ti­tion and rota­tion. I select six can­vases 12 x 16 inches in size and then sketch my knot. My deci­sion to use mul­ti­ple can­vases is pure whimsy, even as I impose my order on chaos; I invite the viewer to destroy it by pur­pose­fully arrang­ing it in another way. I put my knot together and two pleas­ing braids appeared along with inter­lock­ing car­dioids (heart shapes).

The hearts get me think­ing about sum­mer heat, pas­sion and col­ors. I decided on the col­ors of sun­set, pale vio­let, warm pink, orange, red and yel­low. Since my knot is com­posed of golden spi­rals, a gold golden spi­ral is obvi­ous. The knot is an intri­cate affair so I spend some time print­ing out 16 sheets of paper, chop­ping and tap­ing them back together to cre­ate the image map for the six indi­vid­ual can­vases I plan on link­ing together to make the whole. All of this plan­ning hap­pens before I ever touch a brush to can­vas. Now all that is required is to let my design become.

I like to use chalk pas­tels to block out my under paint­ings, because chalk is pure pig­ment that can blend in with the paint I am apply­ing. Then I paint the first layer of color. For me it is very impor­tant to estab­lish where your light areas will go, so the lumi­nos­ity of the can­vas can keep the light where you want it. It is also impor­tant to cover every square inch with color so when you build up shades and tones with sub­se­quent lay­ers there will not be halos or missed spots. I also find it painterly that some base col­ors show through sub­se­quent layers.I work the entire under paint­ing over, except­ing my estab­lished light areas of yel­low, with a pale pink, light­en­ing it up a bit.

Then I glaze the pink over with warm orange and red to blend and unify the background.

I trans­fer the knot design. I employ the chalk trick again, this time apply­ing white chalk to the back of my design so I can trans­fer the pat­tern to my can­vas. I paint the chalk lines over with light pink.

I use glazes to push the lines of the knot into the back­ground, cre­at­ing a screened effect. The final steps involve work­ing the whole thing over with a sponge, using mul­ti­ple lay­ers and col­ors. I add detail to the back­ground, inte­grat­ing the knot, and I soften the edges of my golden spi­ral so I can cre­ate the effect of a golden spray with the final layer of paint.

Hav­ing fin­ished my paint­ing I must name it. I did not name it before, because words do not mat­ter while I am paint­ing. How­ever, when I intro­duce my work to the world words mat­ter because com­mu­ni­ca­tion mat­ters. My thoughts of sum­mer romance, hearts, and fire got draw me to music relat­ing to those kinds of emo­tions. I selected the title from a few bars of the Lady Ante­bel­lum song.

Just a kiss on your lips in the moon­light
Just a touch of the fire burn­ing so bright

Just A Kiss, by Jake Beck­man, is  about the romance of a sum­mer night. The back­ground is the warm col­ors of a  sum­mer sun­set fad­ing into vio­let hues; it fea­tures inter­lock­ing Fibonacci  spi­rals in pale rose tones, which form heart-like shapes and intri­cate braids on  the canvas-implying unseen con­nec­tions, intrigue and love per­haps.  One  spi­ral is high­lighted in a fiery spray of ignited pas­sion.  This work is for sale of course. If you are inter­ested con­tact me.

Yours in art,

Jake, Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The artist has fed­er­ally copy­righted all the art­work in this blog. The artist retains all repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights. You may not copy, re-distribute, imi­tate, derive OR oth­er­wise use these images in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.