AstroNaugthy
20 cm x 30 cm, primed mdf picture frame board, oil paint, permanent markers (Early 2022)
“You always make studies and practices. Do you ever just paint whatever you want without all this references and work?”
Yes and no. I do paint what I want sometimes but I also can’t. AstroNaughty is a great example of that. The painting was made of a watercolor draft that was sketched based on a viewers username “Spacefish”. It was a casual fun creative interpretation of a prompt. But comparing this to the skill level of my other works, you can immediately see the cliff. I can paint without a reference but it will never result in what I actually had within the freedom of my imagination.
Painting in the styles I like to paint includes multiple layers of techniques. From 3D form to organic perspective, light bounce to transparency… To be able to paint something to such detail from imagination requires the painter to be able to 3D rotate the object in their mind to every angle and to I shine it with all textures and light effects, under any light conditions. Learning only a single object to such detail often takes dozens if not multiple hundreds of sketches of the same object. It is not only a laboursome process but also unnecessary to go through and it’s limiting to creativity.
Our imagination doesn’t work on limited archives of already learnt common objects. In best cases, it runs wild with generation countless ideas. It is much more viable to roughly sketch and note these ideas, pick the ones I like, them build references for them. There are many ways to build references and progressively construct an image that doesn’t only match what we initially imaged but also exceeds it in design and quality. The process requires meticulous planning and work even before you touch the canvas with the first brush stroke.
So yes, I do paint what I like, but no it doesn’t look like a movie montage where I paint in a romantic inspiration surge as if the Greek muses themselves told me how and what to do. It looks much more like a clock maker in their workshop: Designing, planning, gathering, cutting pieces and slowly but precisely fitting it all together over days... Mundane but worth it.
