Figmented Flight From

And here we are! This is my completed dream painting. To achieve the texture in this painting (see detail shots below) I painted with a teaspoon by layering as one would with a palette knife, and also scraping and scratching the wet surface to remove and reapply paint. I worked with a wet-on-wet technique to achieve the base of the textured background, leaving the entire canvas thick with wet paint that could be manipulated. The pictured chunks of paint come from my collection of peeled paint palettes. I’m glad I held onto my old paint because it was wonderful to put it to use. I told my roommate that this is the kind of painting that kids would be tempted to peel the paint chunks off.

After I was satisfied with the form, but the colour was still somewhat muddy (see Progress Shot 2), I left the painting to dry. The next day, I used a dry-brush technique to adjust the colour and emphasize interesting textures through the light strokes over bumpy surfaces. After much layering and stepping back for perspective, I have come to a mysterious, captivating, textured image that I am quite satisfied with. It was difficult for my camera to capture the detail of the entire image, so the detail photos are used to show that more closely.

I made the artistic choice to exclude the boar that is in the study images. I didn’t like how the boar was fitting with the picture and enjoyed this simpler image. Also, in the true dream, the boar was behind me, so I could not see it. In my final painting, the beast which the figures flee from is ambiguous and allows the viewer to imagine what chases them. The hunter might even be the viewers themselves! I titled this piece Figmented Flight From to disturb viewers with the incomplete sentence. Viewers can gather from the title that the image is a dream, or at least imagined, and can also grasp that the figures are running away from something, but the title does not reveal what fiend they flee. This lack of completion- or use of “negative space” to quote ART 181- draws viewers even more to the question of what is not revealed.