on doing...

  in my continuing quest to learn more about painting I had a very strong urge to slap paint and ink on paper 

not for any particular outcome, just to discover how it felt to randomly work on an abstract painting

as that is new territory for me I cut my paper into four pieces... the thinking was if I worked on four at once I wouldn't get too "precious" about them and start over-thinking, or even worse, planning

something I am very disposed to doing

(I have no process photos to show as I didn't want to interrupt the flow by stopping to take photos - this was meant to be an "in the moment" thing with no intention of even posting about it)

beginning with black ink, moving on to paint, a variety of brushes, scrapers and skewers to make marks and push the colour around

the more I did the uglier they got... not exaggerating, they were awful

I wasn't bothered by it that much, this was just for fun, no intended outcome, but my goodness they were bad - I thought if I added some collage that might help break up the paint a bit

nope

I could see a few things where I had gone wrong... all the colour and marks were almost entirely in the middle of the pages with the white space all at the margins... and I worked wet in wet with the paint the whole time so a lot of muddy colours happened

when they dried I thought they looked even worse; they didn't even deserve to pasted into a sketchbook as a reference of what not to do so I decided to throw them away but for reasons I still don't understand I had the urge to tear them up first and so I did

as I tore I noticed some of the smaller versions looked pretty good... and after further tearing some looked very good

and so...

I straightened the edges of all the pieces and made a nice little pile of very interesting abstract gift-tags

because of the roundabout way they came into being the tags are all different sizes, some rather narrow, others quite chunky

I've looked at them often since then, always noticing different things - it's interesting to be somewhat analytical about why I like some very much and others less so

they're one of the best examples of random I have ever done but that's not just limited to the paint and mark-making part of the process... randomly tearing things created things I would never have achieved if I had tried to do it purposefully

I did like the torn edges so for many I left the lower edge torn rather than trimming it straight

couldn't decide which colour of thread for the hanger so a strand of each worked just fine

I'd intended to glue a piece of plain paper on the back to cover the smudges of paints but as I turned them all over I decided I would leave it... 

a lot of new lessons learned and old ones reinforced, most especially, don't over-think, just notice what's in front of you and respond to that