Odd story to this one.
I have had this canvas floating around my life for a few years now.
It has had a good half dozen paintings started on it I guess.
Each painting that I started either looked like crap or I lost interest in it.
Eventually I decided the canvas was cursed and stuck it in my cursed canvasses pile.
For some reason I decided to bring a few (4 actually) cursed canvases from my home to my place of work a month or so ago to just play with when I lacked time for something serious, but had a break (or needed one) from other art.
This canvas became a quick sketch of a group sex scene.
It had last been a floral still life.
Hmmm… still cursed.
The next day I used paints already on my pallet (for another one I was working on) to paint over my group sex mess.
It was just the last of the paint on my pallet, and hardly enough, but I did succeed in killing the image.
The canvas sat like that for weeks.
It stared at me with it’s blotchy abstract messy surface.
The painting was awesome.
I had accidentally created a beautiful abstract work.
The composition was fun, and the colors bounced and blended in a way that made me somehow feel alone and expectant at the same time.
The problem with creating a beautiful abstract work is that I am not an abstract painter.
I will never be one.
I see no point in it. Abstract art is done as far as I am concerned. All that could be said in that school of art has been said.
Not for me.
I had to see something in it. It had to become something more.
So… it sat there.
Fast forward to a couple days ago.
I am talking with my wife about making slings.
The type of sling with a small pouch in the middle of two lengths of cord that you spin around and launch rocks or lead.
A deadly weapon that gets very little attention nowadays.
Eventually this talk brought us to Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children novels, and then to the 1986 movie The Clan of the Cave Bear.
Ayla was played by Daryl Hannah.
She rocks it with a sling in that movie.
I’m a big Daryl Hannah fan.
Jump ahead to yesterday.
I am looking at my cursed canvas with the fabulous abstract composition on it.
I see the shape of a figure.
I grab the canvas and just loosely start sketching it out with paint and a dry brush.
Red was what I had grabbed to do this sketching.
My reason was because it was the closest tube of paint to me.
The form worked. I liked it.
I chose my next colors purposefully, but stuck with the dry brush sketching style.
45 minutes later I had turned my abstract composition into the painting you see above.
I had not consciously been thinking of Ayla as a subject, but I had kept thinking intermittently about slings, the movie, Daryl, and the character of Ayla while doing the painting.
When I had finished I realized how much those random thoughts had intruded and influenced my painting.
A very big resemblance to the Daryl Hannah version of Ayla existed in it.
So… I titled it Ayla.
Today I share it with you.
I hope you enjoyed the story/history of this canvas as well as the visuals themselves.
Click the pic (or HERE) to see the painting bigger.
You can get prints of this painting HERE on Fine Art America.
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