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

 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

 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.

 What is Inspiration

What gives you inspiration to draw, paint, make music ?  

Is it the light of the sun reflecting off the water ?

is it that the glistening of the light dazzles you when you are walking, or floating on the water ?  

Is it that it brings out something inside you that is already there or does it create something inside you that wasn't there in the first place ?  

I don't know the answer to be honest. All I know is that sometimes that happens and sometimes it doesn't.

For example, this photo inspired me to paint this. It wasn't the best interpretation of it but I liked how the water shone out.  Ive taken a long time trying to replicate it though.

For me, the real way I paint is emotion. If I don't feel something there is no point trying to paint or do anything creative.  It will be dull and empty (and likely some of what I have on Instagram is just that).  

The flip side is that the emotion can go anywhere and nowhere, I just have to wait to see how its going to end.

these are both based on the same photo, that I can't put my finger on, but was along the Deben near the cut.  The Pencil drawing was soon after I kayaked there and the painting was more emotionally driven as a painting.

Without sounding arty or anything, that's the sort of thing that drives my dabbling with paint.

Last night, I tried to paint, but my head and heart wasn't in it at all and it ended up a canvas and sheet of paper being wasted and ruined.

I should know not to bother by now...