I’ve written about abstract and intuitive painting in previous posts. Today I want to explore one of my paintings a little more deeply. It’s one that feels as though it ranged from intuitive to abstract, and then a small amount of figurative work. It’s quite distinct from my other paintings.

‘City Lights In the Rain’ started out as part of an intuitive diptych. The other half of the diptych turned out to be called ‘Coastal Break’. If you look at the background colours and forms you’ll notice they have curves of the same colours. My intention was to create two intuitive sea scapes. In the end I turned the ‘City Lights In the Rain’ canvas upside down while I was in the early stages of painting it. Here are the two completed paintings.

Evolution of ‘City Lights in the Rain’

The abstraction of ‘City Lights in the Rain’ happened over more than a year. During this time I was working on other paintings. Searching through photographs I happened upon a series of photographs I took in Geelong CBD while we were driving home, just on dusk, on a rainy evening. We had just visited my father, in hospital. There was no seascape in the background. Just buildings and lights. Big streaks of blurred colour splashed over the windscreen of the car, and reflected off the road.

When I finally started work on the painting again, I had new textured palette knives. I started to put the elements of the rain, the lights and the textured palette knives together. My focus was on creating linear marks. This is where the abstraction became the main focus. Choosing to make the lines vertical, over most of the canvas, I immediately made the association with rain. From there, the abstracted marks took on some form. A road, headlights and tail-lights. A body of water in the centre. Another shore in the distance. And in the foreground? I feel as if the viewpoint is quite high, as if I’m looking down. It could be a park. All of these elements are found in Geelong, but not in the same place.

So, this painting is an abstraction of a memory. An abstraction of a place, and an abstraction of forms. It becomes something removed from all of these.

Unique Works

Two paintings, started with the same intention, are now completely removed from each other. Different styles are compounded with different intentions. ‘Coastal Break’ continued on in the intuitive style. It was not connected with a place or a memory. It stayed true to my initial intention to be an intuitive sea scape.

Writers often say that characters have their own presence, and take authors into an unintended plot. For me, ‘City Lights in the Rain’ falls into this space. A painting with a mind of its own.

Both ‘City Lights in the Rain’ and ‘Coastal Break’ are for sale on my Bluethumb page.