Study for Corridor I

As is often the case, this painting was intended to be a work in itself, because I find the idea of producing studies to be tedious: why would I want to do a painting that I wasn't serious about? However, in the process of doing a painting, I learn new techniques, and often the idea of the painting becomes more elaborate and ambitious than it was when I started. If that evolves into something that appeals to me, I'll paint it again, and so my paintings sometimes become studies after the fact. I guess the subsequent "real" painting is more like the retconned remake of the original, the michael bay's "transformers" of the humble animated toy commercial that was my original painting, if you will.
This is the first work that came out of the series that I'm painting now, what I now regard as the study for what would become Corridor I. The genesis for this was the overwhelming desire at the time to paint something, paint anything. I have a hard time falling asleep at night, and in trying to bat myself into something resembling a rational sleep pattern with coffee, I sometimes hit what I refer to as the Sweet Spot. The Sweet Spot is a potent combination of conditions consisting of specific quantities of: exhausted recklessness, tooth-buzzing caffeine intoxication, and drowsing incoherency. In this state, I find I do the work that satisfies me most, and quickly.

I started by painting a rough head and shoulders directly onto a piece of MDF*. More and more, I finding I dislike primed surfaces. I like the personality the surface media can have in terms of tone and texture. MDF, incidentally, is mostly tone, and not much texture. I would recommend roughing up the surface first, but I'm too lazy to actually do that myself and I won't pretend for a second that I'm not. I would NOT recommend using oils like this; it would be like painting on a greasy fast food napkin.
At this point, I'm not concerned about likeness. I find that if I just concentrate on painting a beefy white guy, it becomes a self-portrait over time. Aside from the superfly afro, it's pretty generic. It is also at this time that I try to get as much gesture as possible to my brushwork, so I can paint small over it later.

The best of the likeness comes out when I start putting in some expression. I more or less bulldozed over the generic expression with a dramatic little grimace. The grimace is what I wanted to paint all along, but I needed a face to paint it on. The shirt gets a little work here. I think this shirt is when underpainting white on a black ground started to seem like a technique with a lot of possibility for what I'm trying to do.



The finished painting. This work is a good example of why I love the immediacy of acrylic. I never really want to think about background when I paint figurative work like this, and it allows me to blow through the foreground with a lot of loose brushwork, then hem it in with paint. It allows me to do things like go balls to the walls with the afro, then tone it down until it fits. I think I went through a few afros of diminishing sizes before going with this one, a process reflected in real life, but much more slowly. When I was done, I tossed this up against the wall to dry and then forgot about it.

For a while after, I was trying to stick that grimace on everything, including this horrible hand painting that did not work out and now has an even more horrible painting on top of it. When I was working on it, I tossed that on the wall too so I could scowl at it from various distances, resulting in this juxtaposition. It made me giggle, and I can use it to wave goodbye to you now.

*MDF is short for Medium Density Fiberboard. It is essentially a block of dried glue with sawdust suspended in it. It is very cheap, and very flat, but also quite heavy, fairly difficult to present attractively, and the corners will deform on rough impacts. I like it, but it's not my first choice. Top five, though.