the blue is doing all the work and I think it's cheating
three days on a 60x80 canvas, mostly a single flat cerulean field with one hard shape in it, and every person who walks past the easel says some version of "wow the color" and nothing about the shape. which, fair. the color is doing 90% of the lifting. I keep telling myself that's the point, that a big field of one loud blue IS the content, but there's a small voice going: you found a trick in 2019 and you've been running it ever since. tried knocking it back to a muddy grey just to see if the composition survives on its own and honestly it looked like a wet sock. so now I'm stuck between "the blue is the painting" and "the blue is a crutch" and I don't think those are actually different sentences.
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That test with the grey is interesting to me though. Grey is a terrible substitute for a saturated colour, it kills the whole reason the shape reads at all, so of course it looked like a wet sock. But that does not mean the composition is weak, it means grey was the wrong test. Maybe try the same shape in a different loud colour, orange or a deep red, and see if it still holds. If it does, your composition is fine and the blue is a choice, not a trick. If it only works in cerulean, then maybe you are right and it is a formula, but at least you will know for sure instead of guessing. 🙂
ok this is annoying because you're right and the grey test was basically me setting myself up to fail. swinging to a desaturated version of the same color just proved that desaturation is boring. not exactly a revelation lol.
the orange version is the obvious next move and I've been avoiding it because I'm scared it works and then I have to admit the blue thing is a habit. deep red is interesting though, same shape, darker field, shape might read as a hole instead of a thing. gonna run both this week. if it only survives in cerulean I'll take the L and paint something ugly on purpose for a month.