New painting!

Yay, I finally finished a new painting...my first in over a year. I haven't added it to the web site yet, but it's up on the Facebook page, and I'll probably end up adding it to my almost defunct deviantART page.

I think this is the first time where I spent more time creating the canvas than the actual painting. Thought I would put together a little journal of this unique piece. Due to so many pieces that had to be put together, I first had to lay out everything and sketch out placement.

The wooden panels combined were much heavier than I first anticipated, so I had to use the whole drill, screw, and bolt technique to keep all the panels together. The map was handy so I knew which pieces would go where, and the location of where I would need to drill to get the bolts to match up properly.

I used my customary array of black & white acrylic paints, but also added some metallic paints to add a bit of sheen as well.

This painting ended up in my Random Project paintings, although it runs borderline to my Life Project as well. It's just an observation that life is very much like a web...when first created, it's beautiful, pristine, filled with many different paths and choices. As we live life, as a spider lives on its web, we can make mistakes or have great success. We can get tangled up in our life choices, veering off one path to another and another. Yet the stuff that makes up life is pretty durable, no matter how much you tear and fight against it.

The title "...web we weave" is derived from Sir Walter Scott's "oh, the tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive" quotation. I've mangled the true meaning of this quote, deliberately using only part of this as this painting is not really about deception or lies but about choice.

I've used dew drops to represent the footprints of choices made in a life. Primarily moving towards one direction with wanderings in others as well. The placement of the panels was to hopefully imbue randomness with a sense of purpose...and break up the regular rotation of a recognizable spider web.

TITLE: ...web we weave
DATE: 10.10.09
PRICE: $1800
MEDIUM: acrylics, painting knife, & brush on wooden panels