Felipe Adan Lerma

Deciding When My Painting is Done, Part 3 – Adding Recognizable Objects to an Abstract and Making it Work

In the Light
©Felipe Adan Lerma

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/in-the-light-felipe-adan-lerma.html

(Part) of My Artist Process 😊 🎨

Probably my biggest challenge – besides knowing when the work is done and stop, and thus allowing myself to return to abstract painting after many decades – is what and how to insert something recognizable into the image: a person, or thing – animate or inanimate (sailboats, birds, a bicycle, the moon, etc).

One of the reasons it was so hard for me to learn to accept a good stopping point when working an abstract – colors, lines and forms – was I felt I had to evolve the abstract itself into something recognizable.

Yet, I was often, actually almost always, much happier with my satisfying abstract vs whatever it was I tried to evolve it into looking like (buildings, clouds, mountains, etc).

The answer, for me, even if challenging, in an almost Roschart-like puzzle-like manner, was deciding on the right object in the right location within the finished abstract.

Why?

Because this allows me, after a series of deliberations re composition & source image & color keys, a period of nearly fully-free expressiveness!

It’s hard to express how satisfying this stage of painting is for me – bounded only by a growing awareness to sense when to stop, when to let a streak or stroke of color “be”, and eventually, when to let the work set for the final stages.

Sailboat detail of “In the Light” ©Felipe Adan Lerma https://fineartamerica.com/featured/in-the-light-felipe-adan-lerma.html
Sailboat detail of “In the Light”
©Felipe Adan Lerma

That final stage, for me, is often a grueling combination of choosing the right object (person or thing) to place into the new world my semi-abstract seems to suggest, then actually executing the tighter yet still-painterly representation into that abstract.

Sometimes I succeed so well in completing the work, I find it hard to find where to sign my new painting, lol! But that’s a different still-evolving story for another time 🙂

Signature detail for In the Light ©Felipe Adan Lerma https://fineartamerica.com/featured/in-the-light-felipe-adan-lerma.html
Signature detail for In the Light
©Felipe Adan Lerma

Right now I’m working on a strange little 8×8 with lots of earth tones that follows the above sequence. I’ve been lucky enough to photo-document the changes as I’ve progressed and’ll be posting on that when the full process works out. (smiles)

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Thank you so much for coming by! 😊

Adan

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13 comments

  2. […] — Felipe Adan Lerma (@FelipeAdanLerma) October 21, 2021 Direct link to my post, Deciding When My Painting is Done, Part 3https://felipeadanlerma.com/2019/01/20/deciding-when-my-painting-is-done-part-3-adding-recognizable-… […]

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  4. […] bedeviled me since spring when I did an initial abstract layin, and then worked from there to find what recognizable object to add to create a combo image of something familiar amid abstracted patter….It is finally developing into something I very much like, but am most “bedeviled” now by my […]

    Liked by 1 person

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