Acrylic on canvas
12 x 12 in
I had quite a bit of fun painting dots and it took me three whole days to complete this painting. The red dots are deliciously shiny when you see it in person. When I painted the blue lines with tiny dots I thought they looked like creatures with exotic markings swimming up. The black dots on the grey lines reminded me of the stripey tights belonging to Alice of Wonderland fame. When I painted the light green dots I thought they made it very cheery. Here’s an excerpt from my painting diary:
I might paint it over with white to make its cheeriness pipe down. It’s almost like an image of denial – it reminds me of Cath Kidson products pretending everything is okay in middle class land, when it’s not everywhere else. This actually ties in with my realisation that I’m never going to escape my past. That realisation helps me see that I desperately wanted to join the ranks of ‘normal’ middle class people who have families who care about them and contact them and are kind to them. And I realised I’m disadvantaged by this. And I realise the word ‘disadvantaged’ is linked to a metaphoric way of talking about life as a competition. And I realise that is linked to capitalism, under which regime I often feel not good enough because I don’t have a comfy income. I often don’t know if I’ll have enough money next month.
I’m glad I didn’t tone down its cheeriness! It makes me feel happy to look at all these dots representing the busyness of Spring. My final act with this painting was a lot of Phthalo Green dots. It got very intense in the middle and evens out at the edges. It took about 4 hours to paint the dots. Phthalo Green is a beautiful dark green. Here are photos of the process:
