Nowadays when I’m searching for some inspiration, my main focus is on paintings made with loose brushwork and rough lines. Maybe because in my own paintings I like to work out every little detail, painting sharp and precisely shaped lines. And still admiring those who can “put aside” their works. Here I mean those artworks where the artist paints a few lines on the canvas almost sketchily, loosely, still everyone knows and sees what the blurred contours want to refer to. I am simply a fan of those artists who use more expressive forms and allow viewers to be part of the creative process by ultimately completing the whole picture with their imagination. So the less elaborate parts, the mysteriously depicted forms, also become a unified image in the viewers’ imagination. As a creator, it is a wonderful experience to look at one of these paintings, and I think that as a non-painter it could be also an equal pleasure to create something with the artist.
Encouraged by this, I decided to move myself a bit out of my comfort zone this year and try to persuade myself to create more in this style as well. Of course, it doesn’t go overnight, but I think I can learn a lot in the process and improve a lot through the exercises.
As part of this process the Forgotten Land was born, that was made on a 60×40 cm canvas. Although the theme remained the landscape, I tried to apply less elaborate brush strokes. Compared to my work so far, I have tried to focus on shapes and colours rather than details. I often used a palette knife to enhance the “looseness” and I mixed some colours with an acrylic thickening medium to emphasis the shapes to leave a sufficiently full-bodied, clearly visible mark with the brush.
So the process started. It’s a small step for humanity, but a huge leap for me.
