Applied Confidence

Notes taken directly from my reflection journal, uncut and unedited:

The first piece I’ve ever tried painting oils on wood. I thought the surface would have been too slippery, yet I believe the flat, latex paint I use for the base created some friction for the brush. The shadows became a wonderful problem for me with Applied Confidence. Shadows show themselves to be stronger or darker as we look at them. I painted them that way and, at least the first layers, began to overpower the magenta and teal colors. I was okay with that because it provided the challenge to keep them prominent, yet not overpowering and one of the things I desire to do with these paintings is to have many, many layers. I knew covering over the initial, too dark shadows would mean I’d have to have many layers. It also required me to mix many variations of orange including trying to match the flat, latex orange hue. Matching the teal and magenta colors of the pieces was more difficult than I had thought. I hadn’t painted with oils since the 90’s and so mixing exact colors was frustrating – I used to be able to do this so why the difficulty now?! I broke down and bought some tubes of teal and magenta, yet they weren’t quite right, yet they did help tint what I had learn to mix to a more saturated version of each hue. What got the magenta and teal to overpower the shadows was a glaze of each (mixed with linseed oil). This took forever to dry which was okay for two reasons, one was that I could begin the first layers of Influence and Observing and the glazes thickened up enough so I could set the painting vertical to let the glaze slowly run. The magenta created the best runs (I turned the painting over so both teal and magenta could run towards each other). The more saturated orange shadows seemed to be emanating in waves from the teal reaching upward into the less saturated shadows of the magenta and the runs from the glaze appeared to be pouring into the teal almost as if the teal piece was causing this. It could also be seen as the magenta runs were reaching down into the teal. The magenta piece is larger, color weight heavier and above the teal piece which is a place of dominance or of higher status? I imagined the teal piece’s curved shape moving into magenta’s space respectfully and with confidence. The shadows in this scenario represent an unseen, felt presence similar to what humans can feel / sense from one another. Shadows can be the physical manifestation of human aura and the colors can be seen as personality. Neither color nor shadow exist physically just as aurae and personality. Both need a perceptual system and brain to be realized or perceived.