Friends in Purple

Acrylic, marker, crayon, and canvas collage on paper, 18″x26″, 2014

About the piece:
I just recently finished this painting and I love using that purple paint! It was in the clearance bin at the art store, it’s actually liquid airbrush acrylic paint. It’s super transparent and dries almost instantly but has this really deep tone to it.

At first I was more interested in playing with the color but as I kept working my usual suspects emerged, the bun shape and this kind of wonky angular piece that looks sometimes like a gun or a pipe. That is why I titled it ‘Friends’ because it was these familiar characters that came up again. I’ve seen it said many ways, but there’s this short quote that I’ve taken to heart and I keep coming back to. Basically it says that ‘creativity is subtraction’. Usually that ends up being quite literal for me–I often trim, cut and crop my collages and paintings on paper. This piece used to be bigger but as I added color, shape, texture, line, whatever, I also cut away at it until came together and was done. It’s kind of scary and fun at the same time!

This work has a lot of layered, glued pieces to it. It’s very textured, up close. I love the variations on the pink and purple and how there are these really gentle moments in the paint. They exist on top of all this rough & tough, cut up and glued surface texture yet still maintain their gentleness. When those elements exist together in a work I really feel like I’m getting it right.