It’s Only Someone Else’s Potatoes If You’re Pickin’ Someone Else’s Patch

I finally hit the sheets this morning at about 4:30am after the England vs Mexico game expecting today to be a writeoff but apparently skipping breakfast, the daily walk and the weekly housework opens up a huge void in the day and I’ve completed a painting before 3pm. That was unexpected.

I’m still feeling too time constrained to be able to invest enough energy in a landscape or portrait, so thought I’d have a go at a colourful abstract with oil pastels. The idea was to have a string of cubes through the middle of the painting with various different sizes and orientations. I wanted the cubes and the background to be painted in two analogous complimentary schemes, so I went for blues in the cubes and reds, oranges and yellows in the background. The composition was inspired by the thought of what happens if everyone is driving too close to the car in front in the motorway and someone suddenly brakes.

So I put down some pencil outlines and, in so doing, decided to add some extra cubes above and below the string to balance to better balance the composition. Then I put down colours. For the cubes, I was putting darks clues on faces facing to the left and light ones on those facing to the right. For the background, I started with yellow around the cubes, then graduated into oranges and reds further away. I might have put down too much red to begin with, ending up with a background that wasn’t as yellow and fiery as I’d wanted.

I smoothed out the background with polystyrene chips and then the cubes with colour shapers. I noticed that I’d ended up with some yellow marks above one of the cubes that looked like strands of grass and this gave me the idea of pushing things in a new direction. I put down some luminous yellow above and below all the the cubes. Below the cubes, I blended the yellow downwards into the background with a polystyrene chip and upwards into grassy strands in front of the cubes. Above the cubes, I blended the yellow and some bits of blue upwards into grassy strands. And I finished things off by adding some more grass marks with a scalpel. And that was me done.

Well that was fun. I’ve ended up with something colourful, with complementary colours vibrating against each other. But the best thing about this one for me is that it can be interpreted in so many ways. Are the cubes sitting on the ground or floating in the air or on the ground or on a string? If it’s a landscape, what are the three cubes at the top doing? And if the whole painting a traffic pileup or a landscape or something cooking on a spit or something completely different? I’m not going to answer that but instead add to the confusion by naming it after a line from Country Home by Neil Young, a line that I was struggling to turn into a painting. This one’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.