This is the first paint­ing I’ve ever made. I’ll suf­fix that with “in my adult life”, because I prob­a­bly did some­thing with my hands when I was a kid.

Julie, who’s very famil­iar with the medi­um, got me to sit down and paint with her. I was able to play around with dif­fer­ent tech­niques of strokes and the like. It was inter­est­ing to dis­cov­er the way the colours bleed, the con­sis­ten­cy of the paint, and the tex­ture of the can­vas.

It’s def­i­nite­ly abstract. I agree with Dan’s astrol­o­gy read­ing, in which he said that I see colours dif­fer­ent­ly, but that does­n’t mean I can cre­ate them. Frédéric once told me that it’s eas­i­er for him to paint than pho­to­graph, because if he needs a cer­tain colour, he can just add it to the paint­ing by hand, where­as you can’t do this with a scene in pho­tog­ra­phy. My forté seems to be in cap­tur­ing instead.

Painting does­n’t come nat­u­ral­ly to me. In ele­men­tary and high school, I went direc­tion of music (gui­tar, voice, flute, and piano) instead of visu­al art. In uni­ver­si­ty, when I was­n’t play­ing in bands any­more, I stuck with the writ­ten word, and even­tu­al­ly moved to pho­tog­ra­phy and video when that was­n’t enough.

So the paint­ing cur­rent­ly remains unti­tled. Partially because I can’t put a name to it, and par­tial­ly because I haven’t decid­ed what it is. Which seems a lit­tle sil­ly to me, as my need to cre­ate has always come from the need to express. Even though Jackson Pollock once said, “When I am in my paint­ing, I’m not aware of what I’m doing”, his paint­ings still had a direc­tion, a life of their own, much like an impro­vised jazz solo.

Leave your sug­ges­tions in the com­ments, and I’ll choose a win­ner next Friday. The win­ner will win the paint­ing! Yes, I’ll even ship it to you. The dimen­sions are rough­ly 8.5″×11″ (or 21.6cm×28cm).