Rick Janson Art Studio

Day lillies are great when they bloom. Problem is, if you ever change your mind, they are next to impossible to get rid of. They also spread like crazy. And if they are anywhere near a pool — as ours are — when the blooms fade they tend to fall off into the water and end up in the skimmer.

We’ve had them in our back and front yards for years. In the late 00s I decided to use them as the basis for a series of abstract paintings that turned out to be not so abstract.

Wassily Kandinsky had issues around what was truly abstract, some claiming his early abstracts did have physical representations in them. I’m not so sure. But my abstracts always seem to yearn back towards whatever inspired them, often in a very obvious way. By the end of the 2000s they weren’t really abstracts at all.

If nothing else, my brief excursions into abstract art do push me — at least for a while — to become much looser in my application of paint. I also become more conscious of my desire to apply paint more thickly. If you have been following this BLOG for a while you’ll notice that the work tends to bounce back and forth between a tighter form of representation and a more enthusiastic splash back into the qualities of the paint strokes. I think that is often a factor of how big the canvas size is and how tight the last painting finished up.

This painting in particular has been hanging in my studio for a long time. It tends to catch people by surprise when they come into my tiny space, although lately other canvases have mostly obscured it as I am in the process of scaling up my work again.

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