'Vancouver' is finished

The last BIG thing that needed to be done before my show next week was finishing this piece. I’ve been working on it for quite a few weeks now and it really needed to be finished before the show because I needed a second piece in this size to get the flow of the show right. You would think that creating a work under a certain amount of pressure would have an influence. In fact the opposite has been true. Working on this piece has given me precious time to ‘relax’ and focus solely on the thing I love, creating art, in a time filled with organizing and businessy stuff. 

That being said this piece has certainly brought with it its own set of challenges, some of which I’ve talked about in this blog before. There were some technical firsts for this piece that have turned out really well and will definitely be repeated in future works. I will definitely be working on wood panels more often because that has really been a great experience. Although I might go for a different type of wood panel in the future. Attaching the different pieces of bigger buildings together before gelling so they result in one big gel sheet instead of several smaller ones had also been a great new technique that is definitely worth repeating. With this technique I’ll be able to go even bigger with my pieces, a challenge I’m looking forward to a lot. I already have ideas for a whopping big piece of Amsterdam, the city where I was born. Getting the amount of layers of gel right for the bigger pieces is going to be a challenge as well, it is a delicate balance that is going to require some more experimenting. 

As I said before, this piece was a big challenge from the start because of the minimal amount of pictures I ad to work with, especially when you keep in mind that it’s a big piece. The piece has turned out to be a very pleasant surprise, it didn’t need that many different images to work and it has been an overall pleasant experience to create. It has given me many happy hours in the studio and I hope that it will give many people even more happy hours looking at it.