Today’s watercolor experiment:

Have you ever woken up with a feeling you can’t identify? That happened to me this morning. I sat down with a blank piece of watercolor paper and started to think.

I started with a flat brush and drew a streak with gamboge, a yellow pigment. All my first strokes are curved. I blended in some red and widened the first stroke. I thought I would construct a solid form, a bell perhaps, based on how the red and yellow were shaping up.

I drew another yellow stripe, angled to intersect at the top of the paper. The idea I had in mind was a vanishing point, created by the two streaks. But a look at the two stripes together reminded me of running legs.

I drew two other pairs of running legs, this time in purple.

I have been watching a how-to-oilpaint show on TV and thought I would try mimicking the technique with my watercolors. In the empty space on the upper right of my painting, I tried my hand at dabbing in a rose. As I have had enough of flower petals (see yesterday’s post), I only concentrated on the shape of the flower.

I gave the rose the power to entangle the yellow running legs with its thorny vines. I spent the rest of my painting time pressing the edge of my flat brush against the paper to build the tangle of stems.

Comment:

The value of this study lies in the process. I never did really figure out what I was feeling except for an obvious conscious desire not to paint flower petals for the time being.

The direction that this composition took happened in a step-wise manner. It was an inner narrative of mine. The final result of my experiment today was another narrative, the narrative that will take place within the mind of the viewer. It is necessarily different than mine as the creator, but hopefully it tells an interesting tale.