Janna Bock adores sitting back and observing people gathered in a lovely space to chat over drinks and food. The Visual Development Artist says it gives her a sense of peace. What it also gives her is inspiration. On a romantic trip to France, visiting a wine bar in Nice led to the creation of her painting Mortal Nonsense.
While Bock could have gotten caught up in the details of the scene, she says: “I just wanted to get the feeling across of being there at that moment.” This concept guided both her choice of materials and technique.
Bock started with a Sharpie to block in a sketch; a bold approach since “there’s no going back when you use a Sharpie,” she says. She then added torn pages from the novel Interview with the Vampire to evoke the snippets of conversation happening in the scene. She loves author Anne Rice’s bittersweet poetic language, but she doesn’t deliberately select passages to suit a piece. “I think our brains like to make meaning and connections in most things we come across, so almost always, a passage [feels] right for the painting,” she says. So right, in fact, that an evocative combination of words became the title for this particular work of art.
Bock next washed in thin layers of yellow and pink acrylic paint and worked up the thicker areas, focusing on the shape sizes, colors, and positive and negative space on the 9” x 12” canvas. This size was as deliberate a choice as all other aspects of the piece. She says that there is something undeniable about how an image takes up physical space: “It makes the viewer aware of the composition in a visceral way.”
Using her own artistic instincts rather than the digital tools of her job, such as undo, hue adjustment, and cut-and-paste, Bock has found that painting physically has made her more comfortable with letting go of control. “It’s at once more deliberate and requires improvisation,” she says. “The painting does at a certain point, bit by bit, tell me what it should be.” And when it does, she lets it lead the way.
See more of Bock’s work at her website.
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