Do I return to the real?

I’ve been feeling rather discombobulated recently about my current body of paintings. I’m really not sure about them. The question that has rumbling around in my head is: Am I trying to hard? I’ve been reading recently about the art of ‘letting go’ and allowing creativity to flow rather than causing creativity to flow. If I try too hard, I move further away from what I want to do. That is the dilemma I’m currently facing. I fear I am trying too hard at the moment.

I’ve been obsessively painting quasi-three dimensional virtual reality drawings of objects in oil on wood. This is the result. I have a massive pile of the dam things now.

A plethora of paintings

And looking at them together like this, I don’t quite know what they all mean. I would like to know what the public thinks (I have asked the public). Are they just aesthetically pleasing squiggles? Are they interesting, accurate, recreations of the virtual reality drawing experience? Are they abstract? Are they figurative? Are they between the two? What are they?

Last week I painted this. I tried to go off piste a little in terms of style. This doesn’t fit in with the rest of the paintings. From the start, I struggled with this. I felt that I couldn’t get to a point of end. The more I added, the further away I felt. I worked, reworked, blended, rubbed out, repainted and reworked it. When I finished, I was deeply unhappy with it. I was looking at it from the other end of a dark tunnel. This is not a good feeling.

The one that I didn’t like

To me, it looked like a green splodgy mess. It didn’t have any merit whatsoever. It was just paint on paint on paint, so much so it fussed into one messy blob, and with no essence to speak of. Essence is what I seek. I had painted the essence completely out of it. So I did this.

Back to black

I painted over the green splodges, to start again. Then I went through a few hours of existential angst and self-doubt. I was bored of the lines but I didn’t know what to replace them with. I wanted to paint something real again. I decided to go full circle and back to my fried egg, which started my MA research nearly two years ago. Then I painted this.

Eggtastic?

It is what it is: a fried egg. And now I’m not sure about this either.

I now want to create a larger still-life grouping, of modern objects, linked to the tradition of still-life art, but in a blended, hopefully contemporary, style. I want the objects to be recognisable, yet still ‘cyber’-related, still connected to the virtual world. The objects we own in the virtual world, which may be photographs of our real objects or fictional objects, are blended in our minds and in reality, so hence the ‘blended’ style. The world is fuzzy. It is one great big splodge but it doesn’t have to look like it.  I am going to leave the virtual reality drawing style aside for now, and see where this ‘blended’ idea takes me.

Watch this space, again.

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1 Response to Do I return to the real?

  1. Michelle Sleigh says:

    I may have already repled or l may have accidentally deleted the 1st reply.
    Very interesting Rebecca
    However one suggestion
    Try making a pathway between the seperate pieces so that viewer gets a better interactive experience.
    Almost like the viewer becomes part of the art.
    An demand a big space to exhibit these works

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