Stepping Out of the Comfort Zone

It's good to get out of your comfort zone now and then, especially for an artist.  Trying something new can help develop new ideas and new skills.  With that in mind I decided to paint three small abstract paintings this week even though I'm not really an abstract artist.

Most of my paintings, especially in the last couple years lean towards abstraction but they always have a subject, which means they are not non-objective which is what a full abstract painting is. To make things a little easier on myself I started with a landscape composition in mind, one inspired by a rural scene with a yellow hay field in in the foreground, a green tree line, a blue sky and a red barn.  I didn't use reference a photo, I just had the memory of a photo reference in my mind, this is the result.

"A Spot of Red"

As you can see I kept pretty close to realistic landscape colors and even the shapes are generally representational except for the red spot which doesn't resemble anything in particular but does bring to mind a red barn.

For the second painting I kept the same basic compositional idea but used a warm palette for most of the colors.

"A Spot of Purple"

I didn't look at the first painting at all while making this one, I worked solely from what was in my head.  As you can see this one came out much more abstract than the first, hardly even a hint of a landscape in this image.

For the third painting I went with a cool color palette and even broke out the cobalt teal.

"A Spot of Red Violet"

Prints Available

Same compositional idea but even more abstract I think.  This was a fun experiment and it will be interesting to see how the experience influences my future artwork.

I also made a short art vlog video talking about these paintings, please take a watch;