Documentation: weeks 3-4

The first painting is like the first pancake: a guaranteed failure.

Based on this reference picture.

A total amateur with oil paints, I made the mistake of starting with the darker colours, which made this painting super mucky from the get-go, so I tried to just roll with it and muck it up even more. Perhaps there’s something conceptual in that struggle: trying + failing to clean up ‘dirty’ river ways. 

I found that the turquoise form in the bottom right of the reference picture looked like a face. Perhaps I exaggerated the similarity a bit. Thinking about the land as body + body as land; Gaia - the world as a single organism; river gods and goddesses, i.e. Tangaroa.