City Blue Transfer

City Blue Transfer.

Most of the pieces I make start out without a specific plan on what the end result will be.  This gives me some room to play around (creative freedom/flexibility) with a piece to see what interests me.  If I know the end result, it becomes more of a plan to execute, and less of an exploration.

So with this piece, City Blue Transfer, I started out with just some cardboard shapes on canvas.

Another batch of shapes that I laid on the surface in order to see how they worked, but ultimately rejected them (for this particular piece, but don't worry, they'll show up in something else.).

For a long time I was planning on having City Blue Transfer be a horizontally-oriented piece.

Then one day in the studio I put it aside as I was working on something else and stood City Blue Transfer on its end.  Now I think it might become a vertically-oriented piece.  So many of the preparatory drawings I did might not see the piece after all.  Those drawings will end up in something else somewhere down the road, so it's not really time wasted so much as an unexpected detour.

Let's see what a few lines can do for the base layer...

So then I started painting in the colors.

My friend Terry Rathje stopped by the studio to check out what I have been working on these past few months.  I showed him City Blue Transfer and explained how I had originally conceived of it with a horizontal orientation.  When I actually hung it up on the wall horizontally, I began to reevaluate which way this piece will ultimately hang.  Hmmmm....

Forward the hands of time a little bit and you get City Blue Transfer ready for the second layer of...whatever...

I'm kind of curious myself to see which direction this one goes.