Painting with Different Backgrounds

A couple of months ago, in a gallery class I have been taking the teacher said that “the background sets the mood of a painting”. Up until that point I did not spend much time on the backgrounds of my paintings and for most of them I just left a black void. While this works well for paintings where I want to have a suspended feel, the majority of the time the mood does not match what I was thinking when I came up with the painting. I decided to pursue different colors and techniques for backgrounds to push my color theory further and give each individual piece an even more different feel than the last. The first painting I did this with was my acrylic gouache painting “Emerald Lure” where I tried a fiery sunset to contrast against the black foreground covered in raw sienna.

The image came out well but getting depth on the first attempt at painting with these different backgrounds was difficult as just painting over the foreground made it so the yellows from the background ended up a little too dark to make the transition look decent.

“Intermediate” Pieces

I made many paintings experimenting with the amount of foreground and background to get a feel for what I could do while still keeping the “squiggly” style intact to some degree. The next few paintings I made where all very different moods just by virtue of the background.

This piece was inspired by a work of art Escher intended to do but never finished, it was sitting in my sketchbook for a long time so I decided it would be a good candidate to try the different background technique on especially since there are two different skies in it. I was intending to create an atmosphere of calm in this piece.

This is a piece where I was going for a very intense, even angry mood and the fiery red seemed to help a lot with it. This was one of the first pieces where the background felt more seamless and not forced into the painting.

This was another piece where I was trying to achieve a calmer atmosphere, but also with a more warm and hopeful feel to it. The pink helped a lot with that however this one felt like a bit of a step back in terms of having the whole piece feel seamless.

This painting marked the point where I began to feel comfortable with using more dynamic backgrounds. It feels a lot more seamless than the prior pieces, and the intensity with the purple and orange only serves to add to the chaotic and fast mood of the painting.

Figures directly on the Background

In the next few iterations of my work, I tried making humanoid figures on different backgrounds to give almost all of the power to the background in terms of how the whole painting feels as opposed to just “setting the mood”.

The “Discordant Dancers” is one of my personal favorite pieces. It was the first I did with just figures and a background. The background is fiery yet subsides into a cool calm in the teal, and the nearly faceless dancers done in purple and black contrast heavily with the background. This creates an ominous yet light mood.

These three singular figures on the backgrounds would not perform nearly as well without their backgrounds.

Cabins

I began to work with structures against the backgrounds to give the viewer a more intimate connection with the paintings, as if they were lost in the cold woods and just found refuge.

Refinement and More Experimentation

This next piece “Higher Power” was one of the pieces I was most proud of. I found it lent itself to having a “void” background overall with the terrarium having a background of its own. These elements helped to drive home the feeling of a godlike being in nothingness tending to his creation. It is also the largest canvas painting I have done to date at 48” x 60”.

More Refinement And Experimentation

At this point I had become comfortable in creating a seamless transition between dynamic backgrounds and my style. The goal for this piece was to create the feeling of when you are out in the woods as the fire dies down and your eyes have adjusted to see a blue night sky just before the sunrise begins.

conclusion

I have enjoyed working on all of these pieces and feel like the backgrounds have given an entirely new dimension to my body of work, and intend to keep using them in my pieces moving forward unless the piece specifically calls for a black background.