Next Painting:
Well, this one is quite a bit bigger than the one on the previous post and it is quite a bit more recent - probably about two years old. I painted most of it during an exhibition in Antwerp. I had done a couple of other exhibitions and really enjoyed the interaction with the visitors, but there were moments - in the three weeks the exhibition lasted - where it was quiet, i.e. nobody was there. So I got a little bored. At the time of this particular exhibition, I had three paintings in progress and did not want to put them all on hold for most of three weeks so I asked the location person if I could paint at the exhibition and they said yes (quite enthusiastically, actually). It turns out that visitors to an exhibition seem to like seeing the artist 'in action'.
The above painting received many, many comments about what it represented. There were several recurring ideas: the first was that it was a theatre with the people at the top right being the audience finding their seats, the person in red is the writer, the bit in the middle the stage, the white-robed person and the animal are the subject of the play and the people on the bottom left are the actors waiting to go on stage; the second was that it is a court with the people at the top right being the spectators, the person in red is the clerk, the bit in the middle is the courtroom, the white-robed person is the judge, the animal represents crime and the people at the bottom left are the accused; the third was that the man in red is a money collector and the people behind him are waiting to pay, the people at the bottom cannot pay, the bit in the middle is where the man lives, the white-robed person and the animal represent greed; and finally, the fourth was that it represented the after-life with the people at the top waiting to find out where they are to be sent, the people at the bottom being in that not-nice place, the white-robed person is the judge, the animal is Evil and the person in red is the one who says where people have to go. There is a woman holding a child on the far right and to some they are Mary and Jesus, to others she is the wife of one of the accused and to others a rich woman watching the play from the balcony.
As I painted it, as usual, I just followed what developed. I had no story but since the person in the white robes appeared at some point, I called the painting "The Guru" but that is all I have. I really enjoyed hearing the visitors' ideas about what the painting was about. I found it quite surprising that so many people came up with one of these four theories.
A bit of news about the studio: in the middle of the night, it occurred to me that I have several bundles of rolled up paintings that I still had not unraveled since we moved and so today I gathered the four or five bundles and took them to the studio and unwrapped and unraveled them. I found several that I had been wondering where they were so now I know. I hung a few on the new walls, some on the boards and the rest got re-bundled and returned to storage - one is too big to hang anywhere and the others can be put away and it will be nice to 're-discover' them when I come across the bundles again. So, as a result, my new studio now feels like my studio.