I was scrolling through Instagram the other day, and saw a reel by David Choe. I can’t find the specific reel now to link to it, so I’ll just include a link here to his profile, @davidchoe. In the reel, he was discussing having creative block in the art studio, and so he was experimenting with some things just to get his creativity flowing. He had one canvas where he had added a huge blob of paint, which had dried and hardened as a three-dimensional object on the surface of the canvas.
Then he took another canvas and was squeezing some drops of paint on it, and then took a squeegee and spread the paint across the canvas … plenty of people have done this, but he somehow managed to make it look so good, almost Gerhard Richter-like after he finished running the squeegee across it.
So this got me thinking … I have an old box of oil paints in my garage, as I tend to favor acrylics these days, both for the faster drying time, and also for the ability to clean up with water and soap instead of turpentine. So, with David Choe’s beautiful Richter-like painting as inspiration, I decided to take a small canvas down to the garage and try my own oil paint experimentation.
I hate to say it, but my experiment didn’t live up to what David Choe inspired me with in his reel. Granted, it’s been a long time since I’ve smeared paint around like this, and I know that paint placement and technique in spreading is key – it’s not as easy as it looks to have something good come out of it.
I decided I wanted a figurative element to it, so I made the basic shape of a head, like an abstracted portait … here’s what I came up with. It takes forever for oil paint to dry, so it’s sitting in this pizza box and drying in my garage, maybe I’ll add more to it later, but this was my playful exercise (failed, in my opinion) with oil paint for the first time in a long time. Here’s two views of what I did:
