AIMEE BELANGER: September 2010

Here's a little bloggo about what I've been up to lately. I usually just post images, but this post is a little more about process. I have a lot of stuff going on right now: collages, watercolors, ink drawings, etc. I'm hoping that as long as I keep making anything it will all eventually turn into something.

Since moving into a new apartment and setting up my new room (a big sort of lounge/music/art/study space), I've been able to work at home. I've been using ink and watercolor and working pretty small. Here is a shot of my desk. Note the cornet which I take breaks to practice:

In the studio, I've been struggling a bit-I've been making lots of drawings and little things, but haven't really put out any finished paintings in a while. Here is a piece I started working on about a month ago. I started out working with gouache. It's the biggest thing I've done in over two years, and the first painting to have a figure in it in quite some time:

Just after nearly filling in the whole bottom of the panel with grass (made with individual brushstrokes), I decided to try working with oil. Everything was really flat and boring and I just kept using the same colors over and over again. I haven't made (finished) a single oil painting since college, and it is definitely not an easy thing to pick up again. Basically, I've been fumbling around a lot, making a mess, and ruining clothes, and the whole process is producing questionable results. I ended up covering all of that initial hard work with a new layer of oil, and now the painting looks like I just started it. However, I feel like I've been making the same neon gouache landscape for about two years now, so I figure any practice which shakes things up a little is bound to be valuable eventually.

The painting now:

Note: My digital camera is broken, so all of these shots were taken with the camera on my MacBook. In real life, these are brighter, with more variation in the color.

Last night I decided to paint one of my collage/sketches (see post below). This is the beginning of my second oil painting- I just drew everything out and started to block in color. I spent about an hour blocking in the whole surface. I try not to work section by section, but rather try to build up everything by layer so that my color and spatial relationships develop together.

Shot of the two paintings together:

Here are some collages I've been doing. My process is like this: Make a drawing I hate, cut it up and make a collage that I hate, cut that up and have a finished collage (meaning some of these took a long time with fairly simple looking results). Some of them are images I printed from the internet onto computer paper and then painted on, others are just cut up segments of paintings. Yesterday I started messing around with Photoshopping as well. I hope to do more of these as starting points for bigger projects/paintings.