I was about to post my newest painting all over twitter then suddenly thought "no, I've been completely absorbed in this painting for well over a month, the least I can do is exclusively share it with my fans. ♥️ I KNOW this is not the content you're here for, but it does give you a little glimpse into the real me that those on twitter won't see. I'll even share a little about the piece!

This is the eleventh (the other pictured is the tenth) in a series I've been working on for the past two years. I paint 4-5 paintings a year. they start digitally usually so I spend around two weeks planning, and trying to get the composition right before applying acrylic paint to canvas (I used oils years ago for my art, but switched once I tried acrylic, it's much more suited to my working style). These two paintings will be replacing the two large ones (you may remember these red and blue faces, a man and a woman, that change when the lights transition from red to blue) currently in the club that hangs my art. Both of these use five colours each with a glow in the dark element. For both of these I spent a good two days just trying to mix the perfect colours. The colours are extremely challenging because my goal was that each colour has the same value (brightness) as all the other colours so that your eye experiences a "vibration" where one colour bumps up against another(this happens because you eye naturally wants to figure out what is foreground and what is background in a flat image, and it tries to use value to deduce that, when the colours are perfectly evenly valued then there is a kind of fuzzy blurry effect at the border as your eye can't settle on either colour being brighter or darker. This effect is not something I can truly capture with my photography skills, but I did my best to illustrate that with the neutral light photos.

When I am actually painting I have to switch my lights constantly to make sure the paintings look good under all coloured light as sometimes under one colour everything looks fine but then when our change the light, it picks up discrepancies if I've mixed a colour incorrectly. I'm very bad at keeping track of the recipes for the shades, and this causes me a lot of wasted time. For instance, that yellow on the new one. I spent two full days coming up with a shade of yellow that works with this colour vibration thing (yellow is the most difficult colour to play these tricks with as it naturally is the highest value colour so often when you try and match brightness to a different colour it either makes the other colours look grey, or you might accidentally dull the yellow so much, it has a dull or brownish look to it) and it's a mixture of five different colours (neon yellow, bismuth yellow, neon pink, magenta, cadmium red light + titanium white) and I lost my slip of paper with the recipe and ended up spending another full afternoon trying to recreate and remember the recipe :p

The worst part of both of these paintings is the glow in the dark "paint". I put it in quotes because it acts much more like a fine silty mud than paint, I think because of the tiny phosphorus stones crushed into it. It's a huge pain because it doesn't go on evenly so you have to layer it a bunch, and it also has an ugly greenish plasticy colour so to try and add any colour to it to match it to the rest of the colours you have to be suuuuper careful to only add just enough shade to get it close to matching because if you add too much actual paint to the glow in the dark substance, it dims out or kills the glowing effect. Probably spent at least a week and a half on the glowing parts of this new painting, it's still not perfect 😂

My ADHD gives me hyperfocus for certain tasks, and painting is one of the main ones for me. I am usually at the studio from 10 in the morning til 2-5 in the morning, forgetting to eat, take breaks or even go to the bathroom. I get very little sleep and I kind of run myself into the ground until I can finish the thing
This was far and away my most out of control non-stop hyperfocus painting experience I've ever had, and I need to come up with a better plan as my body is still aching and I'm still catching up on all the lost sleep.
*The day before the big event someone put up a black light, I had not seen the piece with that lighting, so that was very exciting to see, but I'm glad I don't have a black light of my own, because with it I can see allllll sorts of mistakes and problems that I could spend more days working on and cleaning up but I am more than finished with this piece.

Lastly, I will tell you about the painting's content itself, the main image (basically the shape of the outline itself and the eyes of the figures) is from a very small doodle I did in the margins of my notepad in my early twenties when I was in college(I didn't take notes, I doodled. ADHD). I always loved this little image and wanted to do something with it. It shows a guy on the right, coming up to the tall girl on the left who turns her head to face him. He is coming up to her in a kind of shy nervous way, probably to ask her to dance, and he has her attention at least enough for her to turn toward him and give him one shot to make an impression. There is an overlaid image that abstractly represents the two of them "dancing". You can see her head at the top, with long flowing hair, her breasts and belly and her left arm stretching up and over her head, her hand embraces the male outline form, and in front of her you can see the back of the guys bald head, his shoulders and back, his butt and his arm extending to the right where his hand embraces the female outline form. (I outlined these figures in red and blue over a black and white version in the last image here) There are at least three other hidden images in the painting that can be seen depending on the light colour, but the two variations of the dancers are the main intended figures. This painting was the culmination of a number of things that I've always been obsessed with as a creative, attempting to create simple yet expressive images, optical illusions, hidden images and objects, using light to affect how an image appears, organic appearing botanical forms, and surreal stretched out figures meant to communicate human emotions and experiences.
I'm really really proud of this new piece, and I can't wait to hang it at the club. I really hope some of you found this interesting and nice to read. I'm currently on my way to Berlin to hopefully film some content with someone so with any luck you guys will be seeing me use some hole again very soon!