Daily Practice

For a few months, my girlfriend and I have been stretching for 5 minutes every morning.

When I started, I couldn't reach the floor with my hands when bending over; now, I can put my whole palm down like it is nothing. Just from doing this pose for only 30 seconds a day, I achieved something that felt absolutely impossible.

So I wanted to capture the spirit of these daily stretches in my event submission. I started thinking about what was important: I wanted to have a repeating element in my painting, symbolizing the daily stretches. And I wanted to somehow catch the softness and flexibility I achieved with it.

My first intuition was to draw all the poses we do in a minimized fashion, as you can see on the additional pics. Then I had the idea of creating "softness" by blending the pigment into the background, and experimented with this effect by simply drawing circles. I quickly noticed that the circle was enough to achieve what I wanted, and the symbols were not needed at all.

I experimented with the order of drawing and blending and arrived at this process: draw all circles => draw all circles again, and blend all but one with my finger => draw all again and blend all but two with my finger, and so on, until I only blended the last one.

This process itself is also part of the symbolism and takes on a wider meaning: The drawing of the circles symbolizes the stress that we all experience each day, and the blending with the finger is the stretching. This is not only applicable to muscular stress, but to everything self-care related. Taking a little time each day keeps us soft and in tune with our environment (the reduced contrast between the circle and the blended background), even if the stress is applied anew each day.

I finally created a grid to help me create the final piece and put it in a passepartout and noticed that it looks nicer and symbolizes the passage of time better in a horizontal format.

At this moment, I thought that I was finished and uploaded it, but quickly deleted it because I had some more ideas.
The circles, as a very harmonious form, didn't represent stress enough for me, so I tried X-es. The blending had the additional effect of softening the sharp corners and making the symbolism stronger, but the regularity of the X still didn't seem chaotic enough.
So I tried it with scribbles and finally arrived at a result that captured what I wanted. I'll probably try and experiment with this concept further, but this is enough for the event.

Probably one of my favorite pieces I've created yet. I've also learned a lot about abstract art.

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