Making A Mess

I’m beginning to think that one of the most useful things I can do at the start of an abstract painting is resist the urge to make it look good.

That is surprisingly difficult.

There is always a temptation to arrange the shapes nicely, balance the colours, tidy an awkward edge or make the composition feel resolved before it has really had a chance to become anything. But lately I’ve been trying to let the first stage stay much looser.

I put down colour. I make marks. I scrape through things, cover them up, leave sections untouched and allow shapes to overlap in ways I probably wouldn’t consciously design. Sometimes it looks promising. Sometimes it looks terrible. Both seem to be useful.

The point of that first stage isn’t really to make a painting. It is to create possibilities. Once there is enough on the surface, I stop. That pause is becoming as important as the painting itself.

With a little distance, I can begin to see the larger structure underneath all the activity. One area suddenly carries more weight than the others. A shape begins to connect two parts of the painting. A patch of untouched ground becomes important. Something I thought was a mistake turns out to be the most interesting part. The mess starts to organise itself. Or perhaps more accurately, I begin to notice the organisation that was already there. This is the part I’m finding especially interesting.

If I decide too early what the painting should be, I tend to make choices I already know how to make. The work becomes more designed. More competent, perhaps, but also more predictable. Allowing the beginning to be unresolved gives me a chance to find something I wouldn’t have planned. It also means I have to tolerate a stage where I don’t particularly like the painting. That can be uncomfortable and the instinct is to fix it.

But I’m learning that fixing things too quickly often removes exactly the sort of oddness I’m looking for: an unequal proportion, an awkward join, an unexpected patch of light, a colour showing through where it shouldn’t. Those moments give the later painting something to work with. Eventually, of course, intuition has to give way to judgement.

I start looking for the larger structure. I decide what needs strengthening, what needs simplifying and which parts should disappear altogether. The important thing is that I’m responding to something that has happened rather than imposing a composition I already had in mind.

The first stage gives me possibilities.

The looking gives me structure.

The later painting is about deciding what deserves to stay.

I’m beginning to see why these paintings feel more natural when I work this way. The composition is discovered rather than designed. And perhaps that is why the accidental parts often feel so alive. They arrived before I had the chance to make them sensible.

For now, I’m trying not to become too good at the beginning. I want to leave enough room for surprise. Sometimes making a mess is simply the first step towards finding the painting.