As I started work on a new canvas today I began to think about a piece of advice to artists, which I’ve heard on more than one occasion. It is suggested that when you confront a fresh, blank canvas the first thing to do is to scrawl over it with some colour unrelated to the image that is to appear on it. (One artist I saw doing this used bright red.) The argument goes as follows. The blank, white canvas is very deterring. It is necessary to “Kill” it (there’s an odd term!) before beginning work on it. One feels inhibited about making specific marks on the virgin surface, so in order to overcome this inhibition it is necessary to make random marks all over it. Only then does the artist feel free to impose his/her own design on it.
I’ll refrain from allowing my imagination to engage with the psychoanalytic possibilities underlying this suggestion, and confine myself to the practical and artistic dimension of it. The proposal strikes me as bizarre, and bears no relation to my own experience. Apart from anything else, it would be impossible to follow it when working with watercolour–and totally unhelpful with pastels. After all, most pastel artists rely deliberately upon the underlying tone of the paper (or other support) to unify the design, and attribute a positive function to the touches of colour that show through the applied pastel surface. Why would one spend time in careful thought, selecting an appropriately-tones support, only to destroy its potential utility?
Even working with acrylic (as I am at the moment) I like to start by touching in lightly the overall composition, and making any major alterations, before getting into the serious business of painting. I expect that a set of random and unrelated scribbles across the canvas would only make the task of that kind of assessment more difficult.
As we say in Yorkshire, however, “There’s nowt so queer as folk. I can’t get beyond thinking that this is a crazy suggestion, but I would be very grateful to hear of the experience of anyone else who might have tried it as a technique.