1/30/12

Centipede (The Dickinson Girls)



Finally done with this one. It was one of those paintings that I thought would end up lacking something, but after finishing it I found it quite satisfying. It's one of those efforts that you can't truly judge until you consider it done. I was going for a sort of controlled collapsing of the stairs... They became the perfect pretext to talk about paint and edges. The more I paint the more I realize that these two aspects of painting are becoming more and more relevant to me.

The way an area of paint meets another area of paint. Ultimately, I think that's what all my paintings are about. One moment of painting leading me to another moment of painting, until the image reaches a sort of equilibrium. It's about to fall apart, but for some reason remains cohesive.

I guess I'm more concerned about decision making when painting. The way the surface tells the story of how an image was constructed. Good decisions, bad ones, attempts at correcting, strokes that were once totally off but later deemed perfect... I deeply enjoy watching a painting take shape. I even think I actually enjoy more looking at these painted decisions, than actually applying paint to try and describe something.

Anyways, hope you guys like it.

Centipede (The Dickinson Girls)
180 x120 cm

8 comments:

maryvangils said...

Great work as always. Just wondering if you work primarily from life or from photo references for paintings such as this? It's just something I'm kind of grappling with at the moment so I'm interested in finding out how artists that I admire approach the matter.

Nicolás Uribe said...

Hey Mary. I work mostly from photos now. Still draw and paint from life, and I will always enjoy it and find it invaluable as an exercise in observation. But the images I tend to want to try and resolve nowadays often go thru some digital manipulation, so it's almost indispensable that I work from my photos.

But what I learned from painting I learned it from life painting.

Candace X. Moore said...

Love the visual puzzles that are your compositions, and that warm-cool interplay really adds a lot of energy. Nice.

Unknown said...

Always makes my day to see new posts Nicolas! Any shows soon? Available art? Thank you very much

Greg

Ray Bonilla said...

Thank you for sharing this Nicolas. Your blog is a constant source of inspiration for me

Anonymous said...

Amazing work, It is practically like Christmas morning whenever this blog gets updated. If you don't mind me asking. How do you find environments to place your subjects in? Being at art school I don't have that many interesting places to choose from.

Nicolás Uribe said...

Just paint what you know Alexander. Sometimes even the smallest and most boring of interiors can be fascinating if you give yourself the chance to view potential in them. Also ask yourself how can I turn this space into exciting paint. It's not about rich visual information that's accessible to you; instead it should be more about how can I make that seemingly uninteresting info work as paint.

There's also outdoors... endless visual detonators...

Orduz said...

Esta genial la expresión de los ojos, esa mirada no se sabe para donde va.