If You Can’t Be Good, Be Weird #3

If You Can’t Be Good, Be Weird #3 is part of four paintings in which I further explored the tensions of my obsessive perfectionism. In each of these paintings I deliberately used tape in the first layer, because of the risk that paint would slide underneath. So when the first layer was finished, I started rebuilding the grid without tape and added new colours to different locations on the canvas. The differentiated pattern, including the black and white colours, forced me to keep on changing the painting. It’s the obsessive perfectionist in me that wants to keep things under control, but the experimentation is a way of breaking through that cycle. At some point I started to move the pattern 1 cm lower to create a new ‘square on a square’ pattern. Painting #2 follows the same technique as the first painting, but the pattern is double the size and in the process I added another layer of squares to gradually overlay three sizes. Originally painting #1 and #1.5 were one painting. I separated them after an experiment with one part white and one part black. To extend my search in experimentation, I added oil paint instead of acrylic in the final layers of painting #1.5, #2 and #3. I used the transparency of the oil to keep the layers underneath visible to break through that pattern again and to free myself from that obsessive perfectionism.