… is better than none.

Actually, I’ve been working on another in my barrier series. I hope I move on to another subject after a while, but this is a rich vein for me to excavate. The reason for this, is the separation between my older autistic brother and me. In addition to being autistic, Mike is profoundly retarded and nonverbal. My earlier posts (since January 2013)  on this blog were a recounting of my attempts to: 1) understand him; 2) figure out my relationship with him; 3) try to communicate with him. My most recent visit with him convinced me to change my emphasis from trying to figure out my relationship with him and  focus instead on how I can express my own feelings.

Beginning

Below is the first stage of my fifth ‘barrier’ study. I was toying with the idea of keeping the background unpainted. My previous studies (Back to Abstract?, Variation, My Niche, Sketching) all made use of a dark background with icons painted in contrasting color. I was leafing through some of my art books and was reminded of how the work of Kandinsky impressed me. I am not a stranger to his work, having admired him since I was a kid. For example, Composition VIII is the kind of look to which I aspire.

However, in this particular study, I was not comfortable leaving all that white space. It just didn’t seem to fit.

The rest of the first half

I spent quite a while thinking about what to do. Originally I thought that the contrasting color of orange would be a good start. I was pretty happy with the first wedge of orange that I painted, and decided to paint adjoining wedges with other warm colors.

I am fairly pleased with the way the left side of my barrier painting came out. Hopefully, by the end of the day tomorrow, I’ll at least have a sketch of how I want the right side to look.