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Mixed Media Paintings That Glow with an Inner Light
For many, Ross Bleckner’s art put an image to the poignancy of loss during the AIDS epidemic and made the pain of mourning somehow bearable and beautiful. His mixed media paintings have always been able to make me gasp at how vibrantly their surfaces seem to glow.
The Mixed Media
Bleckner often incorporates waxes and resins into his paintings. As a result, the surfaces themselves seem to carry light. He also plays with texture–painting cutout bits of paper and adding them to a painted canvas. It gives the paintings a sculptural or architectural feel—as if you were standing under a dome or portal.
The Shapes
Lines, curvilinear forms, organic forms—Bleckner uses them all. It isn’t one particular shape that is the key, but how he employs them, sometimes repeating them exhaustively, sometimes varying their size to create visual force. The shapes in the paintings somehow corral the light. Instead of diffuse light that seems amorphous, the light seems substantial and carries its own visual weight and power.
The Colors
Notice how colorful Bleckner’s darks and lights are. The shadows are filled with greys, blues, browns and ambers. The lights? Same thing. Tinged with pigments that give them body and depth, the “glow” we are talking about is quite prismatic! He also isn’t afraid to actually use color amidst his dark-light designs.
For Bleckner, doing something over and over enhances his message. Pattern is powerful. It is meditation, and full of meaning. And it has me completely rethinking what doodling and pattern-making are all about.
To arrive at powerful shapes and compositions, sometime you have to stop being deliberate and just start doodling in your art journal. Explore this way of working with the ArtistsNetwork.tv workshop, Art Journaling Live 2 with Nathalie Kalbach. You’ll see how pattern and texture make depth and shapes can come to mean so much, symbolically speaking. This combo is sure to propel you forward in your own practice. Enjoy!
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