Abstract Holiday

from time to time my paintings start to become "samey" and I begin to lose my way, creatively speaking. Things stop working for me and I lose interest. It is on these occasions that I allow myself an "abstract holiday".

I can paint what I like, no need to worry about producing a great masterpiece and  it really helps me to find my way again.

This is tonight's result. I did not start with any preconceptions except that I was going to make this a work in two halves, with a large red area on one side, the smaller side of the paper. It is in pastel and is painted on a very rough 200 lb water colour paper; size about 16 x 12 inch.

Of course everyone thought it was an image of buildings but I did not have this in mind at all when in the process of  painting. It was purely geometrical considerations which were uppermost in my mind.

Of course, the magic of digital editing means that once I have the image in digital form, I can play around with the colours to my hearts content. In fact the original has been "re-coloured" so that the larger blue area has been made bluer to hide the purple/violet which I found I did not like. I normally do a series of thumbnail sketches to see if a colour combination works before I start on the actual painting. Unfortunately I did not do this with this painting.

Just to show the effect of different colours and degree of saturation, I include two edited images.

All three are better than the ooriginal unfortunately, c'est la vie!