Complete Abstraction

This painting started out as a bit of an abstract painting with a dark background with bright colours on it. Its a large canvas so needed something dramatic

I overpainted it soon after with a calm wave themed painting, and thats how it sat on a shelf for months, forgotten.

Ive been painting abstract painting for a while now and was really happy with something Id painted, again, on a previously twice painted canvas, and had made it more industrial and just different.

Starting on this canvas, it went from waves, to a rainbow and into the pink explosion of colour it is now

Hope you like it

 Something Different

Thought I would paint something very different although its also quite similar to what I have painted before

Its called Melting Reality and reflects how ive sometimes seen reality in my head, focused and unfocused, bright and also dripping as if it were wax from a candle

 Abstraction

If you've been looking at my website (https://www.ianhammondart.co.uk) you'll have seen that most of my most recent work has been abstract art, mixing rainbows, nature and geometric shapes in various ways.  

Part of this is because when emotionally I'm in lots of places, it helps me to relax and almost feel the colours and put them onto the canvas or paper, but also its acknowledging the importance of all of the shades and colours to life, and that they are all connected. 

Thats not meant to be pretentious.  It's about shades of colour across all parts of nature, with no one colour being dominant across the board.

So I started playing with colour, trying different things.  I saw an amazing artist on Instagram,  called Maryanne Shakyhand (www.gabbagallery.com) who creates amazing geometric pictures, and so I did a bit of that sort of art, but also flowing rainbows of colour, either as solid flows or lines of individual colour.  

Below are some of these

Im enjoying the less restricted painting style in the latest works, but the geometric style does help my mind to both fly and focus at the same time, which is good at times when its in the wind

Have a look at the other stuff on my website. I hope you like them.  Feel free to comment

 New Listings on Etsy and on Instagram

If you get the chance, have a look at my new postings on Instagram, which are also for sale on Etsy

  

My Instagram site is :  https://www.instagram.com/ian_hammond_artist 

My Etsy site is: https://www.etsy.com/shop/IanHammondArt

Slow period   

Im in a bit of a slow period in terms of painting. Ive been fiddling with abstract things, but can't really concentrate so not posting a lot. Im also a bit becalmed with my website build and Etsy, but hang about, Ill get them all working again soon

that was why Ive been distracted as well.  

Seasons

This is a follow on from my first post .....

I was working on some canvases trying to create a common theme, and not getting very far very quickly, so I started playing with blues and greens, eventually producing this painting that is meant to represent Summer

That led to my thinking I should then add the rest of the seasons, so that's what I did

Spring, 

Then Winter

and Autumn

They're of differing quality, to be honest, and its only the summer one that I really felt.   But in all, I enjoyed the colours, the painting style and the texture of the paint once it had dried.

 Continuing abstraction

After a busy week last week, I thought Id try something very abstract but also fairly restricted in terms of design, and which had texture in 3D

Sounds a bit of a plan, although if I had thought too deeply at the start, it wouldn't have ended up as it finished

So, this is how it started:

just individual lines with a thin paintbrush, looking a bit like threads in embroidery.

It built up a bit, one line at a time, slowly filling the white space in. I didn't add a base layer of paint as the white starkness made the contrasts even better.

The final initial layering ended up like this:

it was a tad threadbare, so I added more and more lines, stretching the darker colours in the centre out towards the edges. As it filled in, so the white canvas disappeared until the finished version ended up as you can see at the bottom of this page.  I love the texture of the surface, in places a mm in thickness, and the colour feels like it is shooting past you as you watch it.  

I am enjoying painting in this style and am interested in what people think of it.

Beginnings

Putting things down onto paper, for me, is always a really good way for me to collect my thoughts, be they confused to anyone else, to make sense of something - life, death, grief, loss, pain, joy...everything, and to help find the way through the seemingly unfathomable mess to get to the other side.

It has never ended up where I think its going to end up. 

A bit like my painting. 

I get an idea in my head, that's about it. Just the kernel of it. Call it a seed, the neurons in my head sparking in a way that they hadn't before.

Colour, or motion or expression of an emotion - and there always has to be emotion to be able to turn paint and water into something meaningful - whatever it starts as just develops. 

Thats why I say so on the social reels, just saying how its started and taking myself on a journey.  More often than not (and I have a pile of paintings and drawings to show this) they end up as a mess of dark colour, of blind alleys or failures, and I leave them ‘to come back to it later‘ -  but in reality I have no idea where its going to end, or what its going to look like in the end.

So, I thought Id start a blog, becoming another of those arty types who think what they say is important (its not) and that way they create is the next best masterpiece (its not - although I do hope it could be, obviously)

In case you read this far, my paintings are currently on Instagram ( @ian_hammond_artist ) but I am building a website so they will be there after that 

So, here goes ....

These were some of my earliest artworks (that I still have or have photos of)