Ideas and preparation

Researching into artist's work, visiting exhibitions, reading and reflecting on my own experiences through out life is generally what inspires my painting ideas and when they come to me, I either jot them down in my notes app on my phone or even better, sketch them down as a visual aid in my sketchbook to visit at a later date and render on a larger scale in much more detail. I roughly draw out the image in my mind with a plethora of annotations crammed around the page that act as notes to my future self, telling myself what to do with the piece, what colours to use, what symbols to use, the positioning of the elements of the piece, the composition, etc. 

As I have been doing this for many years now, I have a large backlog of planned out paintings ready to go and with my mental health finally at a place where I'm able to study again and create work, I feel ready to tackle some of those more detailed and emotional pieces on a much larger scale. I know that in order to do this, I will need to get organised in regards my materials, working area/ space, time and reference images. The latter being a seriously important aspect of the creative process for me, as I am unable to draw and paint the human form from my imagination alone, I need visual aid to ensure the proportions are correct. Even though I'd like to warp the human form somewhat in my images and create surrealist scenes, I still need the reference image to be able to do that. I need to learn to paint realistically to be able to paint surrealistically. I need to learn the rules first to be able to break them, so to speak. 

The majority of my painting ideas are slightly surrealist, abstract and generally other-wordly. A simple image search on google very quickly dampens my hopes in finding the perfect reference image to aid in me painting the sketched out images in my sketchbooks going back over the years. And because these images are so precious to me and speak so loudly of my very personal experiences, it matters to me that they are rendered to a quality I am satisfied with. Because of this, I'm deciding to proceed in taking my own reference images for a painting I've planned titled 'Gehenna', a scene relating to my darkest moments during my PTSD episodes over the past few years. 

"Named in the New Testament in Greek form (from the Hebrew Ge Hinnom, meaning “valley of Hinnom”), Gehenna originally was a valley west and south of Jerusalem where children were burned as sacrifices to the Ammonite god Moloch."

Although dramatically dark, Gehenna relates to concepts such as the underworld, hell, purgatory, suffering, punishment, condemnation, loss of the soul, spiritual destruction, eternal damnation, torment and the abyss; which feel appropriate to the themes of the paintings I wish to bring to fruition. 

There is a reference to 'Anubis' in the 'Gehenna' sketch; the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld and dead souls, which feels beautifully aligned with the under current of the painting and what messages it entails about the focal point of the image; the human nude figure. I also use Anubis as a visual metaphor for the 'black dog' trope, relating to a decline in good mental health - representing conditions such as depression and anxiety, which are closely related to conditions such as PTSD.