The Painting

I have been painting for a very long time. I remember very clearly painting with this terribly smelly paint on this paper so sheer that you could rip it by just glaring at it. But I loved it. The awful smell, the terrible paper, the mess. I loved it all. And I've continued to love it into my adulthood. So for this subnarrative, I wanted to capture my love of painting in photographic form. I focused heavily on the technical process through snapshots of my tools, which are extensions of myself.

This section of the narrative took the longest because I ended up doing an entire painting for this narrative—which can be seen below and named "Sailor's Morning." To complete a painting from start to finish can take anywhere from a few hours, to a few days—and sometimes months or years! For this impressionistic emotional piece, I spent an entire afternoon with limited breaks to crank this out. Not because I didn't have time otherwise but because I wanted to capture this one particular moment in time. I might have completely different thoughts about the painting from session one to session two and I didn't want to bring outside forces onto this piece so I did it all at once.

The initial sequence contains more of the process

"Little Box Of Wonders" An old wine box full of messy oil paint tubes
"Eye of The Artist" A close up of a collection of paint tubes
"The Great Wave" A closeup of a painter's palette in use
"In Contrast" A finished painting of a high contrast red and blue portrait
"More Than A Rag" An artist's dirty paint rag after months of use
"We Make Do" A china plate being used as a paint palette in front of an in-progess painting
"You And I, And Me And You" The artist's paint covered hand in front of an in-progress painting
"Sailor's Morning" An impressionistic painting of the summer sky
"Sailor's Mourning" A closeup of a predominantly red portion fo the finished piece
"Any Closer?" The artist leans in very close to paint fine detailes
"Depth's Below" A Composite photo of a painter's knife overlooking a pit of paint tubes
"No Light" The weary artist after a long day of painting.