For Episodic Director Rudi Bloss, water is a place where he can exercise, meditate, play, and feel alive. It’s a passion that splashes over into all parts of his life—including his personal art. As part of a series depicting swimmers, swimming pools, and water creatures, the painting Backstroke is a perfect example. It’s based on one of his teammates on the Masters swim team at Burbank’s Golden Road Aquatics.
Bloss began Backstroke with a few sketches of the swimmer. “I then created a grid on the blank canvas and broke the body down into simple geometrical shapes without losing the dynamic pose,” he says. After drawing the lines with an acrylic pen, he coated the canvas with a red acrylic base color. With the lines still visible, he describes filling out the shapes with color as “a little bit like painting by numbers.”
As the red underneath “bled through” the other colors layered on top, the painting took on a slightly warm undertone. This provides a subtle contrast to the distinctive contours, which Bloss credits to his admiration for Bauhaus, Cubist, and Mid-Century Modern styles, with their emphasis on shapes, composition, and color.
After more than three decades focused on directing, storyboarding, and designing characters, Bloss decided to take advantage of a recent downturn in work. Instead of scrambling for another job, he pivoted to his easel. Of the result—his ongoing, water-inspired series—he says: “I love that [I’m finally putting] my entire energy into my own art.”
See more of Bloss’s work at www.worldofbloss.com.
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