Check out his work https://www.robertszot.com/
Rob Szot paints with intuition. He feels his way around the canvas and makes decisions based on resolving problems or what feels like a problem. Does a shape feel wrong? A color? An edge? My accounting background makes me uncomfortable with painting by feeling. I love the exact process and theory of Munsell’s color system. I would ask “Did you chose that opaque color because it was next to a transparent one? Why that particular shape? Why put a darker color in that particular spot?” Rob will get attracted to particular area in the painting and say “Right there. Do that one spot in other places.” And- originally I thought “What did I do in that one spot?”
I did learn to love the process. It was what I needed as an artist to grow, to push my boundaries and to let go of one part of my brain and use another that I didn’t know I had. I started to trust myself to make bolder decisions and to trust I could get out of a “dangerous” situation if I had to.
Although, I couldn’t help but try to verbalize to myself some of the process along the way. Notes for myself if I try this again: 1. Choose and plan a color pallet before you start. You can add something unexpected in the final layers. 2. The edges have to vary-some should be hard, some soft, some disappear. 3. Layering transparent colors over opaque colors of similar hues are interesting, layering similar hues but different chromas next to each other are interesting, there needs to be light colors if overall composition is too dark and visa versa – different values through out are important. 4. You need many layers to get the scrubbed out softness to work over the whole canvas, if you scrub out when dry you get a different look than when the top layer is wet. 5. I found it easier to decide on a shape or flow of the shapes to bring the canvas together instead of finding the shapes and hoping that it flowed together in the final few layers. I projected a shape- in this one the Fibonacci spiral onto the painting to give guidance as to final shape of the whole canvas. 6. There is a constant push and pull between what colors and shapes look pleasing next to each other and what colors and shapes look right to the painting taken as a whole. Rob says a good painting should have your personality in it. This one has my love of jungles and gardens in the color pallet and my love of nature and order in the chaos in my final shape. There were hundreds of decisions and hours of work that went into it- and they were mine.
A musician friend, Farrell Burk, created a sound track based off the sounds I created while making the painting. See below. Check out blindingtwinkle.com/blog.
