BradBlackman - "Heaven Meets Earth" 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 8 x 8 inches

Painting Heaven Meets Earth (Time-Lapse Video)

For the past year or so I’ve experimented with painting in a gold, white, and brown palette. Metallic gold is really different for me, so it certainly adds a new dimension to my work.

Starting the Gold Swoop Painting

I wanted to do something with swooping, semi-circular forms, so I started with an all-brown canvas and blocked in some white swoops. Once that dried I painted over all that with gold.

The gold was too much!

I was reminded of Henri Matisse who said that “a thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.”

In other words, a little bit of color can be far more effective than flooding the whole thing. Restraint is powerful.

(Don’t see the video? Click here.)

So I scaled back the gold and wound up with something that made me think of a landscape seen through a fisheye lens. As the painting progressed, the top part felt like sky and the bottom felt like ground. The sky and earth were meeting at this curved horizon and something special was happening here.

It brought to my mind the line “so heaven meets earth in a sloppy wet kiss” from “How He Loves” (the Jesus Culture version.)

This painting taught me to be open to change and to not be afraid to put everything out there and then scale back. There’s always a sense of surging and retreating when I paint.

Life is no different.

BradBlackman - "Heaven Meets Earth" 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 8 x 8 inches

Heaven Meets Earth 2017. Acrylic on canvas, 8 x 8 inches