I think this painting has a lot of vibrating colour – sometimes it almost gives me a headache and other times I’m completely attracted to it’s energy. In choosing the palette, I was thinking about utilising complimentary colours, and my palette had to be cleaned off several times during the painting process to prevent the colours getting too muddy. My palette consisted of Titanium White, Zinc White, Williamsburg Indian Yellow, Michael Harding Yellow Lake Deep, Daler Rowney Crimson Alizarin, Gamblin Radiant Green, Gamblin Radiant Turquoise, Isaro Prussian Blue and Sennelier Indigo.

I thought it would be interesting to use the palette of this painting as the inspiration to do the first few Albers: Interaction of Colour exercises. I didn’t get the exact shades unfortunately, but quite close. The optical illusions of the three layouts show how a colour is affected by its surrounding. In each, the center colour (red/mint/red) is the same in the top and bottom half, but the colour that abuts affects hue.

Sidebar: I wonder if anyone has tried to match hex colour codes to specific paints? I know that artist paint pigments have a specific coding system that doesn’t relate to the hex system. The Pantone system is used for house paints, fabrics, and other commercial applications, and can be translated into hex codes fairly well, but I have had occasions where I would like to use my specific oil paint colours, for example, my business cards and now I’d like to play with my specific colours in the Interaction of Colours app. I have in the past used the tools available at DIY shops that allow you to point scan a sample and match specific wall paint colours, but I haven’t seen the same facility available here in Lisbon.

I’m thinking about how to apply this kind of colour illusion to my paintings. I particularly like the lavender and mint effect where the edges seem to blend and shift (or do I need a new glasses prescription?). It has crossed my mind to make an abstract painting consisting only of shades of middle greys. I imagine it would have an effect, where your eyes aren’t able to focus on the edges up close, and the colours almost merge together from far away. What then happens to the painting itself? Does it end up melting into sea of greys? And then what happens when it is placed next to the vibrating colours of Almost Home: Vistas de Baixo? Perhaps these thoughts will find their way into my next paintings…

For this year’s Strada Challenge, I decided to paint my parent’s house in Singapore. There’s a long story behind the decision, which I’m working on as part of my artist statement for the project. For this post I’ll stick with writing about my process.

The biggest challenge was that technically it would be a fairly large jump for me to go from painting single subjects to complex scenes. I suspected that finishing a painting a day would be a stretch for me so I allowed for the possibility that it would most likely be a painting over two or three days.

Painting with a short time limit means that I have to adjust my expectations. I had to remind myself constantly that the aim of the challenge is to paint everyday. One of the tricks I use is to paint on paper rather than canvas to reduce the preciousness I might feel about how the final painting turns out. I use Canson XL Oil and Acrylic paper as it has a nice smooth finish for crisp drawing and is acid-free to increase the lifespan of the works. I’m also trying out water-soluble oil paints to avoid using turpentine in the house.

When I was thinking about the project originally, I thought there would be plenty of variation within the architectural details to be able to paint at least one scene a day. I soon realised that my parent’s personal affects could not be separated from the space that is their home, and my attention shifted to portraying objects within the space. To me, this project is about my spending time with the house and its contents – and of course with my parents.

I write this post with only a few days left of the challenge, so am very pleased that it looks like I’ll make it to the end. There were a few hiccups and tough days due to battling a chest infection, Singapore’s rainy season, and mosquitoes, but the last few days are flying by.

See the full Mum’s House, 2024 series on my website after the 31st January.

Last January I managed to complete 31 paintings for the Strada 31-day Challenge. The key to my success was my focus on a single object each day. I picked the theme of “bags”, hoping that it would help reduce that classic artistic anxiety of choosing a subject.

Bags can say a lot about us: size reflects the number of things we need/choose to carry with us; they can be fashion accessories or practical; they can portray one as professional, care-free, independent or confident. As I began to dig out my bags from storage, I noticed that mine were predominantly utilitarian and most were chosen for specific purposes.

I really liked the idea of telling the story of how I came to own each bag, however it quickly became clear that would over-complicate the painting challenge by adding in the extra (time- consuming) element of writing. One of these days I’ll get around to writing those stories.

The first few paintings were hard fought but, pleasingly, I quickly settled into the discipline of painting every morning. This success was largely due to the predetermined, single subject matter. I also discovered that listening to philosophy lectures were a great antidote to the diversionary tactics of my internal critic and thus I found my flow and discovered by the end that I actually thoroughly enjoyed painting (most) bags! The stilted, careful, initial drawings eventually loosened into thicker brushwork and suggestive gestures.

On day 26, as I assessed my remaining bags, I realised I had miscounted and was one short. So began a frantic search through our storage for an old bag I remembered once having. Unable to find it, on the morning of the 31st January I made the decision to paint a simple grocery shopping bag – a lucky decision as it has become my favourite painting of the series.

To me, this final piece is the most painterly work of the series: the impasto paint application and level of abstraction achieves realism through the viewer’s interaction with it. By this I mean that up close you see a series of lines and blobs of paint but from far away the brain engages its power of recognition to fill in the blanks and understand what it is looking at. It was a very satisfying culmination of the 31 paintings in 31 days and the discipline and practice that it invoked.

The Art in Function: 31/31 Bags in January, 2023 is available for sale through my website and can be viewed at Atelier do Tijolo.