There are rules to the game of life. The literal board game, The Game of Life, there are rules; also life in general has rules like laws and innate rules like gravity and electricity and stuff. But board games have rules. When a few people come together and play a board game ~ just making up the rules as you go it doesn’t go well. Someone gets frustrated or one gets bored or the winner isn’t as satisfied without a gentleman’s victory.
Art on the other hand has no rules. One can mix pastels with watercolor and paint whatever thing one pleases with a whatever tool ~ a toothbrush or comb or stick or even a plunger. But when you add rules to art it is sorta like the board game thing. It makes it easier to focus on the end goal, without a million billion possibilities.
The possibilities are endless. One can get on Temu and shop like a billionaire getting any and every art supply for relatively cheap. Even the expensive artist grade stuff is relatively cheap. Back in the renaissance people had to mix there own pigment with oil or egg and some of the pigments cost quite literally a fortune being made from semi precious stones imported from halfway across the old world on a camel.
Now one can drive their car or bike to a local art store and find synthetic pigments that would stun people of another era. Some of these colors can only be made in labs. We are lucky, in many senses, to be alive in this day and age.
With all these options it is good to add rules and constraints as not to feel overwhelmed. I like painting in series, like watercolor flowers or baby art. Then I have a somewhat clear idea of where to start when beginning to ponder what to put on the white surface; of that an infinite number of things it could become.
Although there are no rules to art it’s good, in my opion, to set restrictions.
If you want to make a 2 story toilet sculpture made of paper mache tp ~ by all means feel free to. One can paint a picture of pretty much whatever they want.
I painted whatever I wanted this week and that was painting nothing. I didn’t get much really any painting done this week. But I did come up with a new idea for a new series. I’ve been working on that ~ figuring out how to use a laser cutter at the library to cut stencils. I have some composition and rough sketches for this simple but fun modern art idea. Im going to make them as monoprints on gelliplate; which is basically gelatin and mineral oil and one can add paint on top and layer it and remove it because it doesn’t completely stick, but dries. Then you just add one more layer of wet paint and put thick paper on it and books on top of the paper and gelatin plate; and then when that dries all the layers come up on the paper. I took an online class on it earlier this year and it looks like it could be pretty coo.
Bye
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