Painting New Orleans Blog
Why I Collaborated with my Three Year Old on A Large and Expensive Painting
11/11/2015 5:03:53 PM
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Sometimes when I am painting in the studio, my three-year old son Arthur will say "can I paint too daddy?" If I am feeling adventurous I hand him my brush and let him go to town. I swear that I am not crazy, that I know what I am doing, and that my son adds a certain fearlessness to my artwork that I could not reach without his help.
Arthur has always had a large impact on my artistic life, I can remember having baby Arthur strapped to my chest with a Baby Bjorn,painting as fast as I could before he woke from his nap. When I gave him my brush with this particular painting, Arthur added great big gobs of red paint and loose gestural brush-marks. With this particular painting I was getting tight to early in the process and Arthur forced me to correct that. In Art School one of the main lessons is to start the painting loose and tighten up later so that you can orchestrate all the elements to work together as a whole.
Part of my thinking is that a good artwork should have an element of chance, a whiff of chaos. In Art School I heard about how the painter Francis Bacon once thought a painting was too neat and clean so he flicked his brush at it from across the room splattering paint across the surface of the painting, and this guys paintings are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So, if one is looking for something to fuel creativity, something to add a bit of chaos to the mix, I can think of no better source than a three year old, chaos is kind of their thing.
To see this painting and others in person, I will be at the Covington Three Rivers Art Festival this weekend November 14- 15th.http://threeriversartfestival.com/
Thanks for reading,
Adam K Hall
(919) 414 2629
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