Abstract art has it’s place in home decor. Representational work is my bread-and-butter, and how I’ve worked exclusively my entire career. The art I make is either utilitarian, or representational. Usually it’s both. But there are spaces in the home that don’t need the specificity of realism. For these spaces, one of which being the master bathroom, I thought, it might be nice to try an abstraction myself.
I wanted a bathroom painting to be vaguely about water. Washing, cleaning. Tasks that moving water accomplishes. Water’s greatest labor is erosion: the removal of earth which carves and reveals stunning landscapes as it destroys them. Everyone’s favorite place of erosion is the water’s edge. The beach. The moving water meets the sand and our feet. It’s peaceful, but it’s never still. Same with a good bathroom; it should be relaxing, but functional. A place for water to do its work on the body.
We recently got around to painting our master bathroom orange. It’s called ‘Colorado Dawn,’ and it’s like orange juice and a sunrise for the walls. The accent colors for the room are a cobalt-navy blue to tie into the adjacent bedroom, and white. These colors are all incorporated intentionally into the painting, which I’ve hung over the toilet.
The actual execution of the painting was incredibly easy. Disappointingly so. You may not like to hear it, or you may not like abstract art (I’ve never been that impressed, and even less so now), but the image concocted above took all of 3 hours spread over 3 days to paint. The prerequisite thinking of an idea and composition was the most laborious portion of the painting, but once I had an image in my head it was child’s play to lay the marks on canvas, even with great intention and (an alternative brand of) specificity. The ease and casual nature of this exercise has somewhat inspired me to try more abstract painting. That and Jake’s reaction to the painting, which was a loquacious description of hidden scene’s he’s picked out in the brush strokes the first several times he encountered the piece. Viewer participation is encouraging, and multiple meanings welcome.
