Cycle Series ??

This deviation is titled with '--' because I don't know if I'm going to display this painting in the series or not. I feel pretty conflicted about how well this fits into the series.


Here's an explanation of the series.

A gallery director asked me if I wanted to do a solo show for spring. Esteeming both art and art sales, she threw out the idea that maybe I could consider doing a series of paintings with bright, verdant colors that gallery-goers might be inclined to purchase on account of the season.

Initially I didn't like the idea - not being one accustomed to painting according to some strategy or plan, and being one who delights in rebelling even against my own parameters. After sitting on it for a bit, I arrived at a concept that I was very excited about.

For the previous 1.5 years, I have been doing almost exclusively small postcard size paintings. But now that my studio is in full effect, doing large paintings like I did in college isn't a big deal. Furthermore, for the last 1.5 years, I've been pretty insecure as an artist. It seems like every time I sat down to create a small painting, I would consistently want to see simple horizontal divisions of the picture plain and a circle. That's it. And I felt really insecure about that, feeling that I needed to push myself to explore more complex compositions.

Finally I realized that I have been stupid. It is precisely those insecurities that I am to target as an artist. So I decided I would do a series of paintings exploring those two compositional ingredients. Furthermore, instead of restricting color palette, I decided to work on a philosophical theme tied to spring.

I decided that the series would depict an initial circle which, through the succession of paintings, would show the circle enlarging with each painting until, in the final painting, the band/line of the circle would have become so large that it would have become a simple flat band. So the final painting would have a flat band, and a new circle, thus repeating the cycle.