Sometimes revisiting a particular image feels like coming home. But lately it has felt stale. It’s so hard to feel like you are mastering something but still keeping your work fresh. Or to feel like you are working within your “style” while also trying out new things.
I really love the work of Marlene Dumas. She does portraits, and some of her work uses a wet into wet approach to create gorgeous, spontaneous, kind of creepy images. I’m playing around with that approach. She also uses found images from magazines as her references.
I like to be able to work spontaneously and to not use reference images all the time. Plus, copyright issues. But sometimes the well runs dry and I need to work from references to build up my internal image bank.
