The Life & Times of Lucas Anderson -- an Update

Life is long and full of terrors...

So a number of things have occurred since I last posted on this Blog:

• I graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2014
• Found myself in multiple dysfunctional, at times emotionally abusive relationships
• Have gone to therapy
• Got married in 2015
• Switched jobs in 2015 and 2018
• And have since become unemployed :/

I have also been using my art more to try to express some inner feelings I have trouble resolving. It's a process that began in Therapy and informed a lot of my class work in the last couple years of pursuing my degree. I think I finally understand the concept of mark making as pure expression instead of being exclusively the tool of a draughtsman, which I was expressing my frustrations about way-back-when in this post... what a fascinatingly long and difficult, yet rewarding at times, road that has been.

Here is a little bit of my journey:
Drawing without form
(From Drawing class, 2013)

While trying to deliberately avoid any figurative or representational forms, I still tried to be mindful of balance, composition, and value. Though this process got a little frenetic and kinetic (and more than a little messy) I found it very freeing to be able to lose that concern over something needing to be correctly in proportion.

Mono-printing 2014

 

 

Outside of classwork I was working in a journal on a slightly smaller scale. Instead of monochromatic expressions of composition and value, I used much more visceral colors and hues, trying to, sometimes spontaneously, generate some of that "push/pull" thing Hans Hofmann was on about.

Some more recent explorations into this idea, from 2019:

Have you ever tried free-form painting? What was your experience with it? Did you get anything out of it?