painting: ticky tack

At last! After waaaaaay too long spent staring at blank canvases and one unmitigated disaster, I finally made something that I like on a giant canvas.

It's a little bit based on the Princess canvas, but these squares are much, much smaller (about 4cm x 4cm... and the whole canvas is a whopping 80x80) and these colours are way more random (and mean that I went though a whole bottle of white paint).

Actually, as I was saying to J yesterday when he was here (and while he was helping me unveil the painting from underneath the masking tape), I didn't do a lot of the things I've done in the past when it comes to painting (or design in general really)... I didn't overplan, I didn't obsess about colours or patterns or placement or not having two very, very similar colours right next to each other... I just let it happen.

And that's why there are some unpainted squares too... not because I had some grand plan to leave squares unfinished, but when I got to the end of the process and had mixed up all the colours I could think of mixing up, and had picked where to paint them completely on a whim... I had squares left. So I left it, thinking I might come back later and fill in those squares, but the longer I looked at it, the more I liked it the way it was.

I think that was possibly part of J's problem with it, since he's a Virgo, the opposite sign to my Pisces and he's all about logic and thought while I'm more about emotion and intuition... he could see that I'd done this very "mathematical" structure with the tape and the quasi identical squares (which they really aren't... especially when you get to the edges of the canvas... because I couldn't be bothered measuring the whole thing to the nth degree to get each and every square the same, so I just did it "kinda" the same), and then I'd been completely random and arbitrary with colour and placement... and I think the contradiction did his head in. But as I said to him after he mentioned the contradictory nature of it... "Hello, have we met?"

Interestingly though... even though the whole thing is TOTALLY random, every single row and column has at least one square missing on it. The most that are missing are seven, and the least, obviously, is one.

Luckily, when it came to the actual application of paint on canvas, there was really only one kinda sorta "problem" with it... and that was the red paint I put on as the very first colour... because this canvas was a different brand from the ones I'm used to, it soaked up the paint in a different way, and I put a little too much of the red paint on at once... and/or the paint itself was a little too thin, because it did bleed under the (not overly expensive) masking tape in spots... but after that I was fine, and spent an enjoyable evening on Monday watching Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and then America's Next Top Model while painting away happily... but once the tape came off yesterday the bleeding was REALLY obvious, so last night I had to sit there with white paint and a little brush and try and touch it up... you can kinda see it in the image if you look hard enough actually... I'm going to leave it like that for now, but if it starts to bug me once it's actually up on the wall, I'll bring it down again and retouch it.

As for the title... well, it's part of the continuing saga of the fact that the song "Little Boxes" seems to be haunting me (first at the election, now with this painting)... After my walk on Tuesday, I stood in the doorway between my bedroom and the lounge and looked down at the painting on my left, when suddenly the first verse of the song went rushing through my head...

Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes, little boxes
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

Specifically the bit about "a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one"...

It's weird though, I know the song is haunting me because Weeds is back on teevee, but at any given time it will be the song that's floating around in my head more than any other. So I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that I have a painting that's going to take pride of place in my lounge room that will continue to remind me of said song.

Of course, now all I need to do is sort out some way of hanging the fucking thing on the wall... but once it's up there I'll be sure to post a shot of it in place.

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