Starting a Painting

Over the last week I've built two panels that are 4'X6' each, wanting to make a large diptych.  I have stretched canvas over them and gessoed them, but today I started "working" on top of them.  The start of paintings...it's a funny thing.  I can't really say where paintings start.  This one could have started last month, as I sat in my studio finishing up the small pieces that are now a part of the "Formed Alliance" exhibit that is now up at the Frame Guild in Wichita (small plug there), looking over at the vacant end of my studio and feeling a sinking tug at my gut, wanting to return to painting something big.  It could have been a few weeks ago when my son said, "Dad?  How come you haven't made a painting about gum before?"  It could have been the weeks since as I have dealt with insomnia, half way composing a large horizontal plane in my mind and half way willing myself to not compose it now, as I always make better decisions in the moment reacting to happenings with the canvas and media instead of some "plan."  As I said above, today was that day when the happenings started to happen, along with those moments where I was negotiating, compromising, and daring things to happen. 

I have learned not to romanticise or fear the blank canvas too much, partly because it is such a cheesy cliche and partly because those ideas tend to slow me way down.  I am always telling my students that left brain thinking dictates that we do not have to start at the beginning of things, with a logical plan, but can start by jumping into the middle and starting to swim around.  I did find a great nugget of wisdom years ago when reading a book about Richard Diebenkorn.  The passage talked about how after the artists death when family members were sorting through his studio they discovered a little list of notes the artist had made for himself about starting a painting.  I, as an overly eager undergrad, promptly copied the list so that I could post it in my studio and allow it's light to shine on me.  I am reproducing it here without permission or proper bibliographic citing:

Notes to myself on beginning a painting...
1. Attempt what is not certain.  Certainty may or may not come later.  It may then be a valuable delusion.
2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued- except as a stimulus for further moves.
3. Do search, but in order to find other than what is searched for.
4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.
5. Don't "discover" a subject- of any kind.
6. Somehow don't be bored- but if you must, use it in action.  Use it's destructive potential.
7. Mistakes can't be erased but they move you from your present position.
8. Keep thinking about Pollyanna.
9. Tolerate chaos.
10. Be careful only in a perverse way.

I love this list.  I have no idea who Pollyanna was/is, (I am pretty sure Richard Diebenkorn's wife was named Phyllis) but I know that seemingly random obsessions can often prove useful when entering into a studio mentality.

One day, after making many many more paintings I will have to make my own list of starting notes.

Please visit my work at: kevinpkellyart.artspan.com