Thursday, August 5, 2010

Stuff

I was not completely absent from this blog during the past month. I wrote up some posts but never ended up developing them to completion. Some were about specific details of my paintings, and other were thoughts on emotions such as anger and happiness. So, yeah I never finished them so they were never published.

I have to say though, I have been pretty busy with stuff. This summer I ended up taking two philosophy courses, which took up the time I usually spend on sketching and those Weeky Sketches/Paintings I would normally do. I think philosophy is just awesome, it opens up the mind, unclogs its gear, and sets it into motion. I ended up learning about western and eastern philosophies, and it gave me a whole new perspective on life, a new perspective on world religions and non-religions. We also looked at some of the famous philosophers of the west and the east, including Kant, Neitzche and Radhakrishnan. It was just wonderful!

While, I studied philosophy at university, I worked on the Guru Nanak painting at home. It's coming out nicely. In fact, its in its final stages now, and I will (most probably) be releasing it at the end of this month. Right now, I am finishing up the details and working on the critiques I got for it. Needless to say, it's not my usual style of work. It's not as dynamic and dark as my other paintings. It's more calm and cheerful. I am also going to use a wider palette, reds,greens, oranges, blues, yellows and violets. That I think raises the difficulty of any piece - having a wider palette. You have more things to manage and so it takes some experience to be able to do that. That is why my earlier work was monochromatic or used a narrow range of colours. An artist has to be able to think holistically about the parts of the painting in relation to each other, and that includes colour. The more parts there are, the harder the painting becomes. Sound like we are managing visual information... it is just that.