Learning to Let Go – with Paint

I promised my lovely subscribers that I would be sharing ideas that may only have a tangential association with writing and, indeed, being a writer.

So now, as they would have said on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, for something completely different: abstract painting.

In my case, that means playing around with acrylic paints on canvas, with the added sparkle of gold leaf.

This particular project, created as a commission for a very dear friend, was completed over several days in January this year. The canvas is A2 size (594mm x 420mm), and as part of the deal, I took photos at various stages of the creative process and then stitched them together with some music and intro/outro bits to create this short video¹.

What’s the point of showing this? Well, it’s an insight into the creative process.

I’m no great artist – though my friend Sandra insists that I am, perhaps to boost the perceived value of the work – but what I have learned is to just relax and plunge in. I don’t plan what’s going to happen, other than in the vaguest terms. Here, my friend had asked for a decorative piece that featured combinations of red, black and gold, to create a warm focal point for a room.

Something I like to do is create a sense of depth in my paintings, working from dark to light, from monotone to bright colour, but with subtle layering and overlapping of lines, shapes, textures and dots of colour, with gold leaf interwoven with these layers to produce an effect that is at once abstract and organic. Beyond that, anything goes.

Perhaps the most important aspect that can be helpful for writers – indeed any creative – is that I allow myself to make mistakes. In fact, the mistakes aren’t even errors as such: they are an integral part of the process. And in this sense, acrylics (or oils, which of course many artists prefer) are extremely forgiving, because you can scrape back or, as I do, simply paint right over the top. In fact, doing so can, in itself, produce interesting effects and send you in directions you might not have considered before.

This is unlike watercolour work, where one needs to do more thinking before applying the paint which, once dry and absorbed into the paper, is virtually impossible to remove. As I will demonstrate in due course, watercolour work is more about the control of the ratio of water to pigment, drying times and the absorbency of paper – in many ways a more technical challenge requiring the acceptance of risk. My work in that medium is more literal and often actual illustration, but equally about colour and certainly more about light.

Perhaps best of all, painting like this is extremely relaxing and deeply absorbing, quickly leading to that state that the famously unpronounceable Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi² called “flow”, a state of being whereby time slips by unnoticed and we feel contentment and peace with the world.

I also find that the soothing effect of creating a piece like this makes me much more receptive to other creative ideas both during the process and afterwards. Always keep a notebook nearby!

And finally, I cannot overstate the role of music in my creative process, both when painting and writing fiction. (Curiously, for non-fiction work, I prefer either silence or something quite mellow, ambient or meditative.) I have amassed ludicrously extensive Spotify playlists as a result!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little excursion into the long grass of my other interests, and it would thrill me to hear if you decide to take the plunge yourself and have a go. You don’t need expensive tools and materials, especially with acrylics – at various stages, I use household paint brushes to get a lot of colour down quickly, bits of sponge for dappling the surface and ordinary toilet tissue or kitchen roll for mopping up excess colour.

I know some of you actually are working artists, so I’d be delighted to hear from you and learn about your own creative process. Rather like novelists, I know that painters can be ‘plotters’ or ‘pantsers’, some planning their creations to a high degree, whereas others just dive right in and see what happens! Which are you?

Finally, if you enjoyed that video, here’s a longer one (10 minutes) that I created of another painting, using time-lapse photography and a music track some of you might know (Every Other Way by BT). This one shows what you might call my ‘blue period’!

See you next time and of course, your support and patronage enabling me to produce posts like this is hugely appreciated.

Henry

1. All put together in iMovie on an Apple Mac, in case you’re interested.

2. Mee-highl Chick-sent-me-high