Estrecho, Acrylic on canvas, 24”w x 36”h.
Estrecho means passageway or channel in Spanish. This painting was another experiment with the colors, golds, and rust and, in this case, mostly rust.
Because it's a vertical format painting, I decided that the composition should have this kind of channel down toward the bottom. You don't see it until you get close to the canvas, but there are raised lines in the area where the channel is. They remind one of railroad ties.
So after I got that laid in, I applied the rust color paint and some black throughout the canvas. Over that, I used different values of off-white to get different tones and motions going. Again, just leaving the channel area near the bottom, not with a hard line or anything, but a rough space that went from left to right.
I left the edges with a darker color and ran the white up to that edge. And again, with that darker edge, I created this frame, which helps pull your viewpoint back toward the center of the painting.
One of the elements any successful painting has to have is a sense of balance. If you take a picture, let's say, a square canvas, and paint right down the center, one side black and the other white, the black side will be dominant. It will feel off. It'll be off balance. So to create balance, you have to reduce the black side to a much smaller area to help balance that out. In this case, that channel is down toward the bottom. And it helps to balance out all that white area at the top.
When people frame paintings, and when you're cutting a mat for a painting, to do it successfully, you should have equal sides, on your left and right sides. At the top, you want to make it the top, a little larger than the sides, and at the bottom, larger than the top because visually, that creates more balance, like a sense of symmetry. Doing graphic design, I was always conscious of that.
I learned that very early in my career as a graphic designer. At Art Staff Studio, we had a guy who was an excellent illustrator.
We had a guy who was a terrific finished artist and a guy who was a designer. Later, another designer came in, and I learned a ton in the year and a half that I was with him. I learned more than I could have in four years of studying graphic design. That's where I learned those basic principles that you test them, and they work, you know?
Estrecho was an experiment that I thought worked well. I've had some great feedback on it. The piece seems simple, but it has a lot going on.