Artwork by Tom Semmes

Abstracted

signs of life

signs of a rudimentary civilization

Starting with a simple design of horizontal planes and intersecting lines and a few ideas for color, I began to randomly fill in with flat color just to see where it would lead. At some point it seemed that pink had to dominate. I got looser with the paint, using a palette knife. Purples and blue contrasted nicely with that. It seem like a pleasant design but looking a little flat. Something had to go in the foreground. A few quickly drawn black lines and daubed-in white and gray shapes and an ancient civilization seemed to sprout instantly off the rocky cliffs. I began to wonder, what was their means of sustenance? I had such a storyline built up around this that I don’t think I could finish the picture. I ended up painting much of what you see above with what looked like a huge freeway (not shown). More on this later.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 2:00 pm and is filed under abstract, acrylic, landscape. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.