If all else fails, cut it up

I slept on it for several more days, and didn't end up liking the piece I was working on any more than I did last week. Ugh. I felt it was too pretty -- not at all what I had intended. So I thought it might be a lovely backdrop to some geometric shapes and freeform drawing. Which also failed spectacularly.

So, I cut it up.

In this art class I took at the RIchmond Art Center, our instructor had us work on a project where we painted a tableau of a still life (eg, vases, boxes, decorative objects) on one side of a paper, then flipped it over and illustrated the same vignette but as a continuous line drawing. We then cut out shapes, roughly following the lines from our continuous line drawing, then rearranged the pieces on another larger piece of paper and painted over it. It was an exercise in composition -- to train ourselves and our eyes to look at the shapes and be able to compose these disparate objects in a way that was pleasing and engaging. Abstraction from objective forms. To be honest, I wasn't too excited about the exercise at the time because I was in the midst of working on a series which I really wanted to devote my entire attention to. In retrospect, the exercise was interesting and worthwhile as a way to look at the anatomy of your own art.

I didn't quite follow the original parameters, but I did sketch out a continuous line drawing of the plants I have along the windowsill, then cut out those shapes. Since there was so much of the blues/greens and texture, I thought chopping it up a bit might be a little easier to work with. 

It's not fully formed yet, but it's coming along. Right now it feels a bit like disparate pieces on a page and I'm working to make it more of a cohesive piece, or at least so the aspects speak to one another. In any case, I'm more pleased with the direction that it's going in this permutation.

At least it doesn't quite look so JLo/Versace anymore, right?