I often get asked – How do I create the feel of movement in my paintings?
So I thought I would attempt to write a ‘HOW TO’ blog!
How to create movement in a painting –
- Keep your body and your eyes moving at all times. A key is not tightening your own body. A free neck equals a free arm equals a free painting! Alexander Technique in action – the other great love of my life!
- Don’t sit and paint – stand! Work at an easel not at a table.
- Dynamic action, including making sure you are breathing and your free body movement, is revealed in the paint. Dance with the paint. Move your body and the paint will also move.
- The paint is a vehicle for your thinking. Be quick in your decision making. Don’t over think it! Allow the next thought and the next to guide you with an urgency.
- To create action in a physical object, such as a painting, let yourself just go for it! Art is a journey not a relaxation!
- Paint fast. Action and activity again. Cover the white paper or canvas with paint as fast as you can. You WILL have a dynamic painting that way.
- Connect your arms through your back all the way down to your feet. Each step of the painting is a step over your feet. Move your feet as you paint. Let the painting keep you on your toes!
- Respond to the paint. Let the paint take you forward… now this colour, now a bigger brush stroke here … here and now, now here ….enjoy not knowing. Let yourself feel and flow your way forward.
- Trust your intuition. Let the painting paint itself! Listen to inner guidance. It is there, I promise!
- Fast sweeping brush strokes portray action. Use the whole arm not just the wrist and fingers.
- Let the brush strokes do the work, don’t try and hide them. Each stroke is a gesture and therefore energetically loaded.
- Let the brush stroke travel in the direction of the movement you are describing.
- Throw and flick the paint at the canvas, allow random marks, the happy accident. It is a great technique for portraying movement – action painting.
- Don’t worry about going wrong! That will slow you down and you will lose the dynamic movement. There is no wrong in your painting. How can it be wrong? YOU DID IT! It is a representation of your life force!
- Paint big, so your artwork doesn’t get restricted by a small scale. Be bold, paint bigger than you have done before!
- Don’t ‘worry’ the paint. Paint doesn’t like to be worried, it goes muddy. Paint likes to spread and flow, bleed and run, merge and blend, drip and spread. It likes to be trusted, not worried over!
- Apply the paint with confidence.
- And most of all, enjoy yourself. Let yourself get taken over by the activity of painting. Your present moment enjoyment WILL be revealed in the finished artwork whether you like it or not!
Hope that helps : )
SOLD
SOLD
SOLD
‘The Moon Woke Me’
Current work
150 x 100 cm
To be exhibited at Dundas Gallery, Edinburgh in 26 – 30 April 2017.
POA
Wind and Waves
120 x 100 cm
Current work
To be exhibited at Dundas Gallery in Edinburgh in 26 – 30 April 2017.
POA
120 x 100 cm
The Race
Oil on Canvas
For Sale (click here.)
120 x 100 cm
Forward
Oil on Canvas
80 x 100 cm
Currently available on website (click here)
- Free creativity e-course link below(8 days of inspiration delivered into your inbox)
- I am offering Skype tuition for artists or creatives who would like help finding a freer creative flow from the beginning of May. Email me for details.
- Upcoming workshop tuition – ‘Any Body Can Paint – Let Go Make Art’ at the Findhorn Foundation in September
Please contact me for more details …
kirstenfharris@btopenworld.com