Beauty And Ugliness
This week's creativity found me in the odd position of not feeling physically well, but determined to push through the process of making art anyway. I did my best to keep it simple, finishing up a couple of pages and letting the materials play themselves however they wanted to.
When I do this, sometimes the mood I'm in shines through. I feel frustrated in general when I have low energy, and create a mess just to lash out in a small harmless way.
And I'm left with art that at first glance seems ugly, or explores that line between cool and sickening that (if not taken too far) is actually really interesting. I feel like the original meaning of the term “grunge”, as wildly overused as it has become in thirty years, may have described that threshold.
To create the effect, I made a black print on the page with the gel plate and acrylic paint. When it was dry, I poured Clear Tar Gel on each page, squeezed some neon yellow acrylic paint into it, and swirled it around with the end of a paintbrush. After the 9000 hours that took to dry, I touched some neon blue paint to the swirl on the left, and made fingerprints with it on the right. The other accents are glitter tape and Dymo embossing label. It captures the woozy-yet-bold headspace I was in pretty well, I think.
The other two spreads were calmer. I played around with bright neon paints, clear varnish and metallic Sharpies, and washi tape. Lately I've gone in with fewer clear ideas, and more just a desire to experiment with materials and how they interact. Especially things I can pour and squish around. The results are migrating to larger pages outside my art journal, which I might share in upcoming weeks.