OilPants: 30 Studies

One of the main goals of my studies was to try to transmit some emotion onto the canvas. I had vague notions of this process but did not really know what it involved. Some of the questions I wanted to answer where:

Can one cultivate an emotional state with external tools (pictures, music) and internal triggers (memories, mantras, and specific thoughts) ?
How does a painter interpret these thoughts and feelings into paint and is there a good way to monitor or record peoples reactions to ones work? Is monitoring or recording the viewer's thoughts worth doing?
What are some good techniques and approaches to paint in this manor?
Where is the balance between thinking things through and just feeling my way through the painting?
Am I crazy and/or wasting my time?

After discussing my intentions and questions with Todd and Gail I realized that some of my ideas were not worth pursuing and some were. There were also things that I was just going to have to learn as the process unfolded. Gail gave me a helpful tool of working from a system that created some interesting randomness and generated new ideas. That system was basically allowing a random selection process( numbers out of a hat) determine the colors I was using, the saturation of each color, and the visual pattern of how I was painting. Todd contributed the idea of being aware , even though I was working in a more abstract way, of spatial elements. He said that it is effective, when creating depth, to be aware of how you are laying paint down and were you want the paint to lay within the spatial field of the painting(foreground, middle, and background).

I felt a bit intimidated when I started but as I painted, things started to work themselves out. I realized that I was not going to work totally abstractly but use some of what I learned from my process and create landscapes that combine elements of reality and imaginary, geometric, and architectural elements. My painting will also include figures which were inspired by a combination of looking at some of the bay-area figure painters(Nathan Olivera, Judy Brown) and my own experimentation.
I did not stay totally dedicated to some of my original ideas but I was not really concerned with one particular goal. I was more interested in learning new things about paint and painting in a way that really excites me and challenges me. As far as the emotional aspect of my painting, I feel like I was able to sometimes create a state of emotional catharsis and other times just stumble across things that were intellectually stimulating. The vision for what I want is becoming clearer.
Some of the new questions I now face include:

How can I create a somewhat cohesive landscape/environment that includes angular geometrical elements with organic semi-translucent elements?
What type of limitations do I want to place on myself for these paintings?
What specific consistencies do I want to reference for things like color choice, lighting/time of day and perspective.
What type of compositional decisions do I want to make in regards to the framing of the figures in my painting.
What type of psychological meaning do I want to express through the use and placement of figures in my paintings?

Here are four artists that I am interested in from the list Gail and Todd gave me.

Shannon Finley