It isn't often that I have new artwork to share here. Truth be told, I haven't been very active in the last year or so. But I've been trying to make some changes in the last couple of months. I've been pouring myself into creating art more than I have in a very long time. 

Cosmic Disco

26" by 41"
Acrylic on Canvas
Seth Tomlinson, 2017

Description

My goal with most of my art is straightforward and simple: to create a striking image. 

Generally I’m not as interested in themes and messages; I save that sort of thing for my filmmaking. My new painting follows that trend. Cosmic Disco is a 26” wide by 41” high acrylic on canvas painting. It depicts the silhouette of a dancing woman against a background of stars. Inside the silhouette are splashes of bright colours with no discernible pattern. 

I decided to call the piece Cosmic Disco because I wanted a name that could capture its retro/rave vibe while also saying something about the setting (Dancing with the Stars seemed a bit too on-the-nose.)  Speaking of which, the 80s feel of the piece was totally unintentional, but I like it!

Process

The main concept for this piece was worked out before my brush touched the canvas. Even before I did any preliminary sketches I knew that I wanted to paint the silhouette of a dancer. I planned to spatter coloured paint on a mostly white background, and then create the silhouette by painting the negative space black. 

I decided paint over an old canvas of mine that had an unfinished work on it. 

Oh young Seth...

I'm not going to go into detail about what this painting was going to be. It embarrasses me. I look at it and think, "Oh, the things high-school-aged Seth thought were deep..."

I like to think my tastes, ideas and art are a bit more refined than they were 8 years ago. 

Originally, I was going to completely cover it with white paint before spattering colour on top, but along the way I decided that I liked seeing the bright pink and some of the dark blue and black line work of the original piece showing through. Even though the original piece embarrasses me, it's nice for the final work to retain small reminders of who I was and what I tried to create back then.

My second improvisation came when I accidentally spilled too much coloured paint on the canvas. I didn’t like the look of the large red-orange blob, so I decided to do a bit of finger-painting. I left a few handprints on the canvas and smeared paint with my fingertips. 

I then used Photoshop to sketch the silhouette of the dancer. I had a bunch of footage of dancers from a music video I made a couple years ago. I found 2 frames I really liked from different dancers. I cut them together using the head of one and the body of the other. 

I created a mask on top of a photo of my painting using this image mashup.

I used this composite as a reference for my sketch. I wanted my silhouette to be a body. The dancer I used as a reference was wearing a baggy top, which meant I couldn't just trace her. I sketched out the entire outline. For the legs and the head, I merely had to refine the edges. For the arms and torso I had to do a lot more work coming up with a realistic shape. Next, I played around with the scale and position of the mask to find my ideal composition. This is what i settled on.

I printed this image and used it as a guide. First I sketched out the dancer on my canvas with a faint outline, then I filled in the background.

My final improvisation came after I completed Cosmic Disco as I had originally planned. I had painted all of the negative space a solid black, and that's all I had intended to do. 

But I didn’t like the result. It was too bland. 

I decided to add stars to the black background and the final result is what you see at the top of the page. 

Final Thoughts

Most of my work follows a similar process of careful planning followed by improvisation when my plans don’t work out.

That sounds a lot like life, does it not? I like art, even "meaningless" art, to reflect the balance between order and chaos; planning and mistakes; and improvisation that is always present in real life.

When I dug this old canvas out of my basement to create something new, I knew immediately that I was going to paint something where the human form was central. The human figure is a subject that I’ve always been artistically uncomfortable with. I want to force myself to create art where I have to confront my weaknesses so that I can improve. Like I said earlier, my goal wasn’t to communicate an idea or a message; I simply wanted to create something beautiful. 

I didn’t intend any deep meaning beyond the beauty of the image.

Sometimes that's all we need.

~Seth

P.S. Here's a GIF of the work-in-progress photos from start to finish.