This oil painting ‘Shadow Grid – 2026-10-03’ look me a long time to complete, not to paint. One of my more loosely painted pieces. Well, to be honest, I’m not very sure (anymore) how long it took. I started the project back in 2011 and I remember I struggled with it, big time! Obviously, that’s the task bestowed upon every artist – to struggle and I am no exception to that rule. What I remember is that I found the artistic motif to be very attractive. There was this MDF sheet I already treated with gesso but I didn’t know what to do with it. That was until I saw the motif for the foetal position, something I had done back in 2004. This time I liked cranking up the emotional aspect, together with some cubist features. Same position but a bit more dramatic.
Loose Strokes?
Little did I know I found myself a bit in a jam early in the stage of painting. Proportions came easy and I even had some ideas with regard to the thickness of the paint layers. There comes a time when an artist like me gets to know John Singer Sargent with his loose brush strokes. Completely arbitrary, one could say Rembrandt invented those loose brush strokes, Sargent perfected them. To date I have been a very meticulous painter. Surely, inspiration runs through my veins and on a whim I can set up a canvas just like that. Only for me to complete within a week or perhaps after some years. One strenghth (discipline and endurance in my case) can also be one’s weakness. There you have it. No one is defined by qualities that reveal only beauty or ugliness.
Compositionary Challenges
The thing is, I often avoided thick, lush brush strokes. Strangely, I recall how much fun it was doing Roundism – 2018-02-02. That said, this one shows more blobs and patches than you may be used to seeing in my work. Something was missing though and I shamefully have to admit to something. Initially, the composition was a bit ‘off’. The model simply was a bit too small. Consequently, there is a lot of negative space, and these are formed by those sheets. First, I tried to solve this by showing some interesting, cubistically styled patterns. Only to dismiss them later, because they didn’t match with the loosely painted female form, decorated with thick layers. Well, they still show a little bit but not too much.
The Solution, Finally!
Then came Roundism and Neo Deco, which took me years to perfect. However, this painting stood in my hallway for 15 years. That was, until last Friday. There was this inner urge to finally complete some pieces I didn’t have a solution for in the past. Oh boy, there are some, yet to handle by my hands bearing much more experience than 10 years ago. In this age of AI I thought I’d ask a bot a question what to do with it. What do you know! The very moment I entered a prompt something popped into my head. A vision of window frames being cast as shadows on the model and the bed. That was the solution I sought for. It took me years and only some hours to complete it. Perhaps these frames tell something about the state that modern human beings are in. What do you think?
