April | 2014 | Summoning of the Muse

I woke up this morning feeling rather nostalgic for the days when I actually had a signature “style”. It’s the one that made a brief reappearance in my Violinist painting. Back in high school, I used to paint a lot in pretty much only the three basic primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. Technically it was a couple more than that, because I used various shades of each of those (for any paint geeks out there, the basic set is usually: ultramarine & cobalt blue, permanent rose & alizarin crimson, and cadmium medium & light yellow, plus white and dioxazine purple in place of black – which just muddies colors in my experience – for lightening/darkening). I’ve felt rather self-conscious for a while now about the fact that my paintings are kind of all over the place stylistically. I guess you could say I’m experimenting, and any good artist will experiment, but I can’t help feeling envious of artists with a unique, signature style that people can recognize as theirs. I don’t feel like I have that, at least not anymore. But this morning I felt like painting like Past Genevieve, so I did just that, and it felt lovely, that cozy, warm feeling of having a long chat with an old friend you haven’t seen in a while, but with whom you still get on very well because you’re just kindred spirits. The subject matter was all just random stuff pulled out of my inspiration folder that I thought would lend themselves well to the holy trinity of primary colors.