Urban Sunset

Jo Reimer.  Urban Sunset.  24x30".  Collage

It's not at all obvious but this piece started out with an under-painting of orange, magenta and yellow and somewhere along the way all the yellow was covered up except for that tiny bit in the lower right corner. That yellow presented quite a struggle to me because the papers I covered up were quite beautiful. Precious, even. The last of the lot.  Gone.

When a paper or a painting or even a passage is considered to be too precious to cover over it can become a stumbling block to creativity. It certainly was for me, and for the longest time I couldn't move on. The original direction of the colors in this piece was simply too close, too boring, too analagous.  What did the work need, I asked myself.  Gray maybe. A city is mostly concrete, after all.  So out came the collection of gray paper to cover those four corners. And there it lay for a few days while I gathered the courage to cover up all that lovely yellow. 

The lines of magenta on top of the brightest orange were done with a stencil which I took with me the day I painted at the Glencoe HS Art Week  last month.  I wanted to repeat the shapes in the stencil so I held it in place on top of some of the gray area and dabbed on some white paint and then added shadow, working with pencil and thinned down paint until I had it just right. 

The figures in the cityscape are all me. Shadow photographs printed onto painted papers and added as collage elements.

Urban Sunset is on view in the current show at Oregon Society of Artists.