When I thought of trying #JCW June 12 x 12 Abstract Painting Project, I realized some people would think why. I have my reasons. When I was an art student at Georgia State University, I took a watercolor painting class. My expectations as to what this class would offer was that it would offer a wide range of techniques in watercolor and that I would learn how to master watercolor painting. The professor was not what I would call a good instructor. I quickly started to question his method of teaching. Besides being not very tactful at our weekly critiques of our work, his favorite method of teaching was to either set up a still life and tell us to paint it for two or three weeks or to tell us to look out the large plate-glass window in our studio room and paint anything we wanted to in the urban setting that we saw out the window. Really?  He never came by our work area to offer suggestions on technique or composition; nothing. I finally got up a nerve to question him on this. He replied that if you paint something long enough you will discover painting techniques and interesting subject matter through intense scrutiny and thought process. This is why I am trying this 30 day project of painting abstracts. I also am using just the primary colors, red, yellow and blue and a little white if needed. I want to push myself to see how many different painting techniques and ideas I can come up with. I realize that not all of the paintings may be great but that is ok. I can always go back and correct them or if needed just paint over them for another project.  I do plan to hang them together on a wall in my home in sequential order of the date they were painted but also after I record this in photos, try to arrange them to create a big 30 piece painting puzzle. I will not be trying something this large every month but I know I will learn a lot and I hope it will encourage other to paint and try abstract painting especially if they have only painted realistic paintings in the past.

In this blog post photos are posted of the first week’s work. I will try to post each week’s paintings and tell a little bit about m thought process to document and for information purposes.  The first week I just jumped in and started painting. Nothing was really preplanned other than the size of the canvases and the colors of paint. The first five days I did paint around the corners of the canvas with the blue paint and then develop the center.  By the sixth painting I decided that was going to be really boring for both me and the viewer to have that many blue background paintings so I opted for yellow to shake things up a bit in the sixth painting.  With the first four I used thicker applications of paint and on the fifth and sixth I used a lot of yellow in the backgrounds and stated to scrub in small amount of paint with very little water. I also tried to vary this technique with some thinned paint applications that were very wet.

Al of these paintings are for sale for $100 each.  Please contact me if interested.  My shopping cart for this website is under construction.  You can use the contact form below.  Please leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts for #JCW June 12 x 12 Abstract Painting Project. Why?