Keeping it Loose, the Golden Light

I am gen­er­ally paint things tight.  Every brush stroke and color has a pre­de­ter­mined place to land. I don’t usu­ally paint out­side the lines.  I have been work­ing on becom­ing more painterly, more expres­sion­ist.  One  stretch in this direc­tion is paint­ing abstrac­tions, but the other is just paint­ing a lit­tle looser.

My lat­est foray into expand­ing my painterly aspects includes the fol­low­ing 2 works.  First up, Mak­ing a Splash!

Mak­ing a Splash! Run­ning white horse paint­ing by AZ expres­sion­ist artist Jake Beckman

This paint­ing actu­ally started off as an abstract in gray and blue.  As I splat­tered paint on the paper I was reminded of island pony round ups in var­i­ous places in the world.  Although I have not painted a horse in quite some­time the sub­ject is quite famil­iar to me.  One pony was kind of bor­ing so I added two more.  I left the splat­ters show through the white paint, and only edited two small blobs around the ponies’ heads.  After  the paint dried my cat laid on it — I took it to mean that she thought it was done.

The sec­ond work is Golden Light.

Golden Light, land­scape with cranes by AZ expres­sion­ist painter and bird artist Jake Beckman

I did an impre­cise wash in pri­mary yel­low and magenta as I had the inten­tion of por­tray­ing the golden light in some man­ner.  I again chose to splat­ter the paint­ing with a grayed out yel­low ochre.  The gray got me think­ing and pretty soon I had roughed in the trees and leaves on the wet paper… the paint bloom­ing a lit­tle, soft­en­ing the edges. I had “extra“light gray paint so I a pal­let knife to rough in some scenery in the back­ground, let­ting a lot of the wash show through. Next I worked it over with a darker gray, again I used a pal­let knife and painted the grass in the fore­ground.  The final touches were the wad­ing birds, they are sup­posed to be cranes, but if you see a heron or an egret… At this point the art looked “done-ish” but alas my cat refused to pro­vide com­men­tary. I posted it on Fack­book, and an online “cat”, Kathy Char­ron, pro­nounced it fin­ished. 

In both cases I cer­tainly could have added lay­ers and lay­ers of paint until I achieved a more pho­to­graphic appear­ance, but in both I chose to embrace the flow of paint, brush­work, and the indis­tinct edges.  My can­vas is not lay­ing on the ground scream­ing, “Stop paint­ing on me!”  It is very hard for me to let them be, partly because don’t have that sure feel­ing that “this paint­ing done.” But I have resisted the urge to paint them to death.

Mak­ing a Splash! sold within sec­onds of hit­ting the internet-sometimes that is the way it goes.  I think the fore­short­ened imagery, and energy of the piece grabbed the buyer’s attention.

How­ever, Golden Light is for sale.  Con­sider mak­ing an offer if you like it.

Yours in Art

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

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