I treasure my book of Howard Hodgkin’s paintings, whose work I greatly enjoy. This painting started out as a homage to his style, with my stamp of originality added reflecting my Japanese heritage as an admirer of woodblock prints.
I wanted to paint abstractions over water, so I splashed paint with my brush to create an ambiguous texture representing mysticism. The shapes of the white clouds are stylized to vary the rhythm from the primarily horizontal orientation of the painting.
I started out by creating a striped composition with many lines and forms. I wanted to create transparency, so after the paint dried, I painted back over it, then scraped it with a painting knife to create some textures.
This painting started with a structure resembling a house. So I proceeded to paint a house and some figures and a rainbow and made it look more like a home. The word “We” became a center of the composition.
