Each Sunday, Riverwest's ArtBar hosts the "One Week Painting." The concept is simple. Once a year, a fresh canvas is mounted to the wall and 52 different artists make new paintings that are displayed for one week. Sometimes, the artist incorporates elements of the prior work into his or hers, a la an exquisite corpse and other artists choose to paint over the canvas completely and begin anew. This year I had week #46 and given what I had to work with, decided to paint over the prior canvas.
Conceptually, I began thinking about an appropriate painting, and being the incorrigible punster that I am, thought that color bars would be an excellent bar painting. Get it? BAR painting? A painting OF bars? In a BAR? Nevermind. So of course, that's a little too simple, so I had to come up with an additonal dimension to the painting.
I've recently been working on a DVD cover for The Thickness of Delirium, and have more color and design theory kicking around the recesses of my mind than I care to admit, so I had this great idea of doing the whole thing in complementary colors, a la Jasper Johns. The fun part about the process was figuring out which colors to use. See, color bars are RGB and paint is pigment based--roughly CMYK. But there are few accurate correlations between CMYK and RGB, much less pigment and RGB. So I made my best guess. I started about 6pm and was done by about 9:30pm.
