In the first post, I briefly described my creative session with children Doroteja (8) and Domas (5). Later, I used the drawings by children, their stories and photographs to create 10 different ideas for a Neverland Portrait. Out of these ideas, the family chose their favourite – Doroteja and Angry Fish. The video below briefly shows the whole story of how this idea came about.
In this and future posts, I will talk about the further development of this idea and its various painterly versions.
As I said in the post Preparation and Idea Generation for a Painting ‘Doroteja and Angry Fish, I painted the initial ideas on small format (A5) paper sheets with watercolours. The first idea was Doroteja and Angry Fish in the Sky, then – Doroteja and Angry Fish in a Vortex. Having already painted all the fantastic ideas with fish in the air element, I had to move on to the ordinary and, as a third idea, paint the underwater world.
As with the previous ideas, I did not want to paint a realistic underwater world, but rather to use modernism style – to create abstractions by utilising art materials. In this way, the painting can convey more through metaphors and associations.
Watercolours are especially suitable for the theme of the underwater world because the paint is based on water (hence the name). The technique of watercolour is about how the paint in a form of water floats on the surface of the paper. Applying a brush on a dry sheet of paper will create a line of sharp edges. Meanwhile, if we brush through a moistened sheet of paper, the paint will spread in all directions and the lines will appear blurry. However, even between these two techniques there are many in-between choices on how to create various effects. Paper can be moistened more or less, and paint on the brush can also be of various concentrations. The colour that is watery applied on very wet paper will spread like a blurry and transparent balloon. The colour that has concerted pigment on a slightly moistened paper surface will spread in vivid and unusual textures that appear like bacteria.
The play of watercolour paint was, in a way, an underwater world in which Doroteja found herself with an angry fish. Moreover, the fish itself was painted from the watery lines. It is not an ordinary underwater world that we have used to see in photographs, but one that could only be alive in the imagination or in a fairy tale.
At this point, for me, everything comes back to the beginning again – the fairy tales are not about the surrounding world but about our inner experiences. There are different kind of laws in our heads than that of reality. As a result, the fantastic elements of fairy tales are an invitation to travel to our inner world.
In this painting, Doroteja harnesses her and her brother’s anger, which appears as a dangerous fish in the fairy-tale world. The body of this fish is so ghostly and immaculate that you cannot even know if the anger is just under the girl’s feet or if it’s like water flooding everything around.
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