Saturday, April 18, 2009

I should just adopt my toes as my formal signature


"Broken" is now completed, photographed, signed, and hung on the wall. I am tempted to paint over the signature and attempt to resign it. Are there pens that will write on acrylic? I have always had difficulty signing with a brush. (And, yes, my toes are probably visible in the original unedited photograph of every single one of my paintings and could probably serve as a de facto signature.)

I'm really pleased how this painting turned out. I don't just mean the finished image; I mean the whole process. Remember that earlier post where I called this one the angry painting? I just surrendered to it and turned this into a big narcissistic exercise in art therapy. In the end, I reigned it back into whimsical But even the whimsy doesn't deny the original anger, it's just twisted slightly. My mood when I started it was, "This is what you did to me. Are you happy now? Do you see how broken I am?" And my mood when I was done was, "Oh, yeah, you think you broke me? This was just my chance to let all the poison bleed out with the tears and I still have all my pieces to put back together."

Have I told the story of the art teacher who told me my kind of art is "best kept between the artist and their therapist" and should not be inflicted upon the general public? He's probably right, but he also painted really boring landscapes, so I kind of don't care.

0 comments:

Post a Comment