Facebook

I was feeling up for a challenge today, so I decided I’d do a painting that was a set of twelve random vignettes and that I’d ask friends on Facebook to choose the subjects.  They came back with a moon landing, a successful Brexit, my dog, a fart, waves, cheese, an elephant and a transsexual Scotsman playing the bagpipes while eloping to England with his violin playing boyfriend.  That still left me needing four ideas, so I picked one myself (the time-independent Schrodinger wave equation) and then looked down my Facebook newsfeed for ideas and found people talking about asparagus, goldfinches and Ukrainian architecture.  So that was me set.

At a high level, I like what came out at the end.  Everything all a bit random, just like a Facebook newsfeed.  It reminds me of all the jumbled conversations you tend to get in the background between tracks in a Pink Floyd album (or on Is This The World We Really Want by Roger Waters, which is the absolute mashers).  It’s nicely balanced, without one side being heavier than the other other or with particular colours clumped together.

The painting only took two and a half hours.  That’s not counting planning, preparation and clearing up – I’m playing by Jamie Oliver fifteen minute rules here.  And it uses an unheard of fourteen different colours: my usual twelve plus cadmium red and a bit of phthalo blue.

At a micro level, the vignettes are of varying degrees of quality.  Going from left to right and top to bottom:
– the dog is better than expected.  I don’t do portraits, human or animal, but this one’s vaguely recognisable.
– the Ukrainian doorway also qualifies as not too bad.  I did well to not add too much detail.
– the goldfinch was a big success.
– I don’t like the moon landing.  Nothing went right when I was painting in the figure that I’d masked out.
– I think the Schrodinger equation works, not that you’d really call it a painting.
– the wave turned out really well.  Very pleased with that and cerulean blue worked for me for once.
– the cheese-inspired abstract piece didn’t work out.  The Prussian blue spread out too much.
– the elephant was a winner.  I shamelessly copied Hazel Soan’s elephant technique by laying down raw sienna, dabbing in a cool red, dabbing in blue, leaving it to dry and adding in shadows.  I couldn’t have painted the elephant from scratch like she does though.  I had a few stabs at a pencil outline until I got it right whereas she can go straight in with the initial yellow with no outline
– the Scotsman with the bagpipes worked.  I left out some of the detail in the picture my friend had in his head.
– the fart was accompanied by its goldfish dealer.  I think it worked out OK on this small scale.
– the asparagus was awful.  Too ambitious.  It brings everything down a bit.
– the successful Brexit isn’t too bad.  It uses the hipster artistic technique of tearing the paper into two pieces.  I’m happy with it on this small scale but I’d never make a cartographer.

Maybe I’ll attempt this experiment again another time.  But for now it’s being cut up to be used as collage material.  It’s as if this was always its destiny.