Sometimes I listen to various business programs and occasionally the topic of corporate R&D product initiatives provideing a strong future for that particular corporate world comes up. In my mind my imagination creates these huge corporate buildings, where deep in the bowel of corridors there is a wing of rooms with a simple sign which demarcates this area as, “R&D”. The people who work there are working on the problems of what the future will look like. I imagine what these people are like and how they might think. They consider problems never considered before or problems that have failed to illuminate solutions in the past. I imagine what it would be like to work there. It is a wonderful daydream narrative.
When the daydream is over I find myself sitting at my studio table thinking about my next piece. Being a painter the next painting is the future. I think of the millions upon millions of paintings which have been created or are being created. It would be so easy to believe the next painting might be insignificant in the troves of paintings out there, it is kind of looking at the night sky and seeing the vast array of stars and contemplate the insignificance of our existence. Yet that is the beauty of our humanity. Our very existence is predicated on creating and being. We celebrate the creative capacity to change and build a future that has not existed before. When I start each new piece I want to create a painting to show the world what it hasn’t been seen before.
I am evolving as a painter. My mother used to smoke Virginia Slims, their slogan was, “You have come a long way baby!”. Yes I have. Yet I know that I have a long way to go. In my work I rely on what I know and discovering what I need yet to know. This is where my world of R&D comes in. I do not have a large corporate wing to conduct my work but rather 56 square feet with a table and seat. In this tiny space my R&D world as a painter has more or less 3 different components which effects the future of my paintings; composition, the medium and painting itself.
In my blog about “How I Decide What to Paint”, I talk about how ideas come to me. To me composition is king. I have studied many different ideas and theories about composition online and they all have their merit. For myself I search the world around me for existing compositions that capture my attention. I have been doing that for all my life. I constantly consider the value of what I am seeing. It can be the disarray of my dining table or a rock perched on a hillside, I toy with each image’s meaning. Many times I have change my vantage point or how I am considering what I am looking at, to see it for what it is, not only how I want to see it. I have also studied other painter’s pieces with similar compositions but perhaps different styles. I sometimes study who they were and how that impacted who they became as painters. I am an intuitive person and I imagine what they saw and what they created. For years I never really understood Van Gogh, until one sunny hazy day I was driving past a corn field and the way the sun hit the rows of corn field it finally hit me. I stopped the car and got out and studied the landscape. It was like Van Gogh was with me. I could see what he saw for the first time. I never forgot that moment. I realize each painting I do is a reflecting the world I see. I constantly reflect on my development both inside and out, and foster my ability to see the world around me, not only for new ideas, but perhaps new ways of seeing things in my compositions.
Mediums are a fascinating component of our work. Everybody remembers with fondness opening their new box of Crayola crayons and mesmerized with the crisp new crayons and considering the possibilities. When I go to the art supply store, it is the ultimate candy store experience with tubes of paints of every imaginable color and hue. Paint brushes and pallet knives galore. It is an orgasm of possibilities. It is one thing to be inspired by possibilities and another creating them. Each painting is about a problem solving how to best create an image with the mediums and skills you have at your disposal. As I have mentioned I use a paint brush reluctantly, so I need to find other ways to apply the paint. This is where I play with the mediums and see what they do. I have created dozens of test pieces where I will play with colors and create new textures. As part of my R&D I built a simple wooden stump to stamp my paint on the paper as a way to problem solve creating textures for a number of stones I have done. Since then I have created about a dozen stumps, each one slightly different, creating different effects. I have used spritz bottles to apply water to acrylic I have laid down and use different wait times and I remove the water in different ways to create different effects. About half my paintings I need to come up with some new way applying paint the paper. In a current piece I am experimenting with using acrylics and pastels. Though I have tried to find different ideas online, most of the solutions I have had to figure out for myself. Like in most R&D facilities one failed solution for a problem actually might solve a different problem I will have with a future painting. I have a binder of all these test pieces that I often page through for possible solutions. This kind of playing and experimenting is a cornerstone to my R&D.
The final component is doing the painting itself. There is no better way of impacting the future than being present in the moment. Each painting starts with laying the first color down. Each time I lay a color down I assess about how that looks or how that will support the composition. I become a student of my own work and constantly wondering what I have I learned in that moment. Sometimes it goes to plan and sometimes it goes all wrong. I remember one time I put down a series of yellows for a sky. Then I wanted to introduce a dark blue for part of the sky for contrast. With my broad knife I applied the first wide swath of Prussian Blue and the sky turned green,… Duh! I sat there horrified as I was deep into this painting. Then I paused and considered what I was looking at. In this case I decided to go with it and let original composition go and let this painting take me where it was headed. I discovered and learned a lot from that painting. Discovery is not just about the world outside yourself but what happens inside yourself. Being aware of these discoveries is what makes my tiny studio in a tiny cabin the sweet spot of my R&D world.
Metsa Studio 