Fear of Black

A dear friend and fellow painter once commented that canvases that had been painted over in order to be used again, contained the ghosts of the images hidden beneath. I have to say I agree with her. This recent piece has many ghosts hidden within. This is a large canvas and has dominated the space in my studio for years now, as one idea after another went awry to be primed again in fresh white gesso. I always wondered if the increasing numbers of ghosts from the old images were creating subconscious blocks in my mind. With the last misadventure I decided it was time to take the bull by the horns and find a way to embrace my shadows. I couldn't possibly let this big canvas languish around gathering years more dust. To turn things around I decided to prime in black, an act that took supreme courage on my part.

As a painter, I have always shied away from using black even in the tiniest quantities. You could say I have been almost phobic about it. The sight of this huge black canvas was so daunting that it sat there for months as I procrastinated like mad in coming to terms with it. I'd met my Waterloo.

Then one day, while sitting in my huge deep pink arm chair staring at the lovely deep pink bougainvilleas in our garden I suddenly knew what to do. The idea just arrived in an instant and I leapt out of the armchair and rushed to paint. Although more correctly, the desire to paint these blue squares had been with me for a number of years, but I hadn't managed to resolve the right way to represent them, much less dealing with a black canvas at the same time. Suddenly I had hit two birds with the one stone or three actually. The third was the aim to limit my palette as much as possible, getting as monochromatic as I could.

I started with the small blue square in the centre and worked my way out, moving from tiny brush strokes in French Ultramarine in various tints and tones to bigger brush strokes in the successive outer squares along with reduced tinting and increased toning of colour. The completed piece is the last photo.

Archie naturally contributed to the work. He began by swiping at a full brush of blue paint and ended up with a paint sodden paw which I had to drop everything to clean. His favourite activity then became to sit behind the canvas and punch back at me with his paw as I placed brush strokes that bulged through to the back.

The painting is 180cm X 117cm and was completed on Valentines Day, hence it's name Blue Valentine. I'm reasonably happy with it mostly because of I've finally started coming to grips with my ghosts.