Today’s watercolor experiment:

I’m trying to stay within the bounds of the chosen topic of my latest series related to the portrayal of time. Summarizing my progress thus far: I developed a special graphic to represent my version of a time line; I assigned colors on the yellow end of the spectrum to represent the past (including sepia).

I have tapped my dream images as a source for one of my visual experiments and used colors and forms of my graphics to create abstract studies of time.

However, to proceed further, I need to reacquaint myself with design principles. Specifically, I want to review the tenets of Paul Klee and Wassili Kandinsky.  Both Klee and Kandinsky articulated design principles based on point, line, plane and color.  I hope to study their design methods and incorporated them into my work.

Without a thorough study, I can only incorporate snippets of their principles into my work.

Today I began with a triangular pencil tracing. I painted a streak of Indian yellow, flanked by two streaks of Bismuth yellow. I intended to create the illusion of a curved plane, with its origin at the apex of the triangle. I am using the color yellow to represent the past, so the plane I constructed is a spatial representation of time.

The tip of the yellow triangular plane points to a blue circle. This blue dot is my ‘point’. Blue also happens to be the color I use to represent present time.

Emanating from the blue dot are two fat purple lines. I used purple, as the complement of yellow, to help project the yellow plane toward the viewer.

If lines, points and planes are part of visual grammar, perhaps the purple line, together with the dot is a punctuation mark, an exclamation mark to be precise.

Time Plane
9″x12″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block