Week 7

Painting Foundations - Surface, Substance, and the Colour of Feeling

This week deepened my understanding of painting as both a physical and emotional process. Stretching my own canvas for the first time gave me a sense of quiet ownership — a reminder that every artwork begins long before the first brushstroke. Exploring different materials, from textured heavy-body paints to delicate transparent mediums, taught me that paint has personality. As I mixed colours by hand and built a colour wheel, I began to see colour as more than theory — it became personal, intuitive, and expressive. Whether bold or soft, each colour choice felt like part of a story unfolding across the surface.

The Beauty of Colour

Recommended Readings:

Antoni Tàpies – Painting and the Void (1985, p. 56)

Key idea: Tàpies explores emptiness not as absence, but as spiritual and expressive space. He believed painting could act as a form of inner silence — of presence through restraint and subtlety.

Max Bill – Concrete Art (1936–49, pp. 91–94)

Key idea: Max Bill promoted non-representational, constructed painting, built on form, shape, and mathematical balance. For him, painting was a visual language — not symbolic, but direct and experiential.

Hélio Oiticica – Colour, Time and Structure (1960, pp. 101–105)

Key idea: Oiticica saw colour as structure and space as active. He challenged static painting by inviting movement, rhythm, and physical presence into the work. His art aimed to be experienced, not just viewed.

Richard Estes – Interview with Herbert Raymond (1974, pp. 257–260)

Key idea: Estes, known for photorealism, believed painting was a careful, deliberate translation of reality — a meditation on detail, light, and surface. He used photography but insisted the painting transformed what the camera captured.