It all began last August (check out the picture in the gallery below) when I wanted to experiment with mixing colours. I've always been a fan of Victor Vasarely's work, especially the colourful ones. Growing up, creating something like his work with markers kept me busy for many fine hours. Now, I wanted to use acrylic paint, and mix the tones myself instead of buying every colour in the store.
What did it take? Buy wooden blocks online. Give them a base coat of white paint (discovering you need a decent quality white paint, not the cheap one). Build a custom frame to hold all blocks and sand them off. Repeat the process two more times. Glue them to pieces of wood so you can paint each one more easily, but still compare shared in two directions. Discover paint dries darker than you would like and guesstimate how much lighter a tone-between-two-tones needs to be prior to drying to match correctly. Pre-assemble blocks in a square. Decide the colors are not optimally mixed for half of them, so redo that block. Several times. Meanwhile, have surgery, recover, restart chemo.
In short, a lot of fun. But it is rewarding in the end, even if the tones are not perfect, the paint is not always even ... much like life itself, perfection is not the objective here: just looking at this piece makes me smile. Do you like it too?
Additional note: this piece is not available for 'adoption' ... I spent too many hours on it over a long period of time, from the first chemo/radiation treatment before the surgery until recently, and I like the result too much. I'm not against another shot at something similar though, but it would take some time to create.
