Experimental painting

Guys, sorry, this is absolutely nothing to look at, but I've actually been working on it for a very long time. So to make up for it not being all that in terms of finished product, I'll describe the process. 

Firstly I'd like to talk a little bit about doing experimental work. I have a book, or at least an essay, in mind, but sadly I can't recall the title. The gist of this book (I think it was a book) was that artists need to take time to retreat into entirely their own space to experiment on art they don't show anybody. This isn't production art--art that you sell--but practice art, or soul art, if you like, where you feel around for what your next step is. When you make this practice art you do it entirely by yourself, interacting with only your intuition, feeling out what you want, what you feel is right. This is a spiritual experience, and something nobody else has a right to intrude on. 

I feel like the internet artist culture has kind of destroyed this practiced art stage. People who want to show their work do so and are promptly critiqued with exactly the Wrong Kind of critique. The point isn't form or anatomy or artistic prowess, but experimentation, and a lot of the people who jump to critique on the internet are not aware that this even exists. For them, all artwork is supposed to be well-composed, anatomically correct, and basically something you sell. No. Not the case. 

So ordinarily this kind of art would not, and SHOULD not, be shown, because of people who want to be helpful are in fact tracking their muddy paws all over your learning process. However, I trust my patrons to understand the difference, so I'm showing you my feeling-it-out work. 

Trying new things is always a gamble. And with art (I'm gonna be totally honest here) as soon as you gamble you show your nasty, hairy, unwashed ass. Art is freaking HARD, and as soon as you try something new, some skill you're not good at, it looks freaking terrible. Well this looks terrible, but I've learned more making this terrible painting more than I ever have making my slick, finished, I-already-know-how-to-do-this animal head paintings.  So I'm showing my ass here to let everyone know that it's fine to show your unwashed ass in private, because you're learning something, and it's even ok to show your unwashed ass in public, provided you can fend off all the this-sucks-and-doesn't-look-as-good-as-your-normal-work comments without getting tailhole troubled about it. 

So here's what I did and what I learned:

 My initial painting sucked balls. It was fast, scribbly, and the anatomy was terrible. Folks, fellow artists, whatever you do, get the anatomy right the first time, or keep it in mind the WHOLE time and fix it as you go, or it's going to look awful. You can cover it with detail, but like, c'mon, that's lazy. And it's going to catch up with you. (I'm totally talking to myself, here :P ) 

Using Open Golden Acrylic ( a paint made to mimic the drying time of oils [but actually it dries much faster]) I slopped down a form and figure and then, hating it, I ragged it out.

In oil, wiping down your entire painting or a portion of your painting really helps with form, composition, etc. It destroys all the detail and lets you see what the hell is going on under all those hergletyspergelty brush marks. In this case, scrubbing the whole painting with a rag, I saw my anatomical problems much more clearly, and also discovered that I can make a really beautiful, blushy kind of gradient when I scumble, which is to smudge out detail, among some other definitions. 

Learning how to scumble Open Acrylic was a revelation. The  actual visual product was AWFUL. It's all dark, the anatomy is bad, the composition is boring. This is a BAD PAINTING, but I learned more working on this bad painting than I would have a good painting. 

I then tried using a white prismacolor pencil to bring up the bright, white areas. I gotta be honest here, I hate painting. I mean, I don't hate it, but it goes against my natural intuition as an artist. I'm really a pencil kind of artist when you get down to it. I like the fine lines. When I'm working digitally it feels more natural to work with a very small brush and scribble in shading and highlight instead of doing it with a large brush and working down to smaller detail (As you do with painting) . So if I could use white and black color pencils to do value and then just sneak color in via  glazing, that would be really stellar. Unfortunately the white prismacolor I was using is no good at bringing value back up to bright white, or even anything above middling grey, from a dark canvas. So everything is dark, dark, dark, which is no good. Even low-key work needs to have some bright spots in it, to create contrast and interest. 

So, as sad as I am to say it, I might have to abandon the idea of using white pencil on a dark background. It would have been terribly useful to me, but paint is really the only thing high pigment enough to bring a dark canvas back to bright white. 

To be perfectly honest, I don't think I'm going to even try to 'rescue' this painting for selling. It has taught me some invaluable information about the versatility of Open Acrylic, which I can use on future painting, and about how far you can push color pencil, but in the end it might take me more time than necessary to make it a production piece.