Imagination and emotional connection go hand in hand in art-making. If you don’t feel a connection with what you are creating, bring in more imagination and treat different areas of your work as characters – even if you won’t be including any humans. Let’s look at this example!
This small painting is part of a series I made for the Albert Edelfelt Foundation exhibition. It will take place in August-September.
Inspired by Albert Edelfelt
For the colors and composition, I was inspired by Albert Edelfelt’s artwork “Koivujen alla – Under the Birches”. It is not this painting that I photographed in the Albert Edelfelt exhibition at the Ateneum Art Museum, but another similar work that I made a mirror image of.
However, I was more inspired by another “Koivujen alla.” See the picture here!
My version of “Koivujen alla” didn’t have any people. Instead, I used my imagination to depict human characters in the form of a plant and an object.
Combine Inspiration and Observation!
A good way to get the imagination going is to combine two different things. For example, if you saw an artwork that inspired you to create, also gather unrelated observations from your surroundings. This way, you need your imagination to bring them into the same image.
In this project, I remembered a pine seedling that I had seen in a nearby rocky forest. The name of the area is Pöllökallio (owl rock) and we often go there with our dogs. This little pine tree was like a bonsai! It was so sweet that I took a photo of it.
When the pink color of Edelfelt’s painting met a crooked stem of the pine, a tree-like rose was born!
Emotional Connection by Asking: Who is This?
The rose became the most challenging part because I wanted it to resemble the woman with a hat in Edelfelt’s painting. I thought about the hat when I painted a rose, but it didn’t work at all.
But then I came up with thinking about the character of the woman instead of her hat. That way my imagination met the emotional connection, and I quickly got the impression I wanted.
Build a Story to Boost the Emotional Connection!
One of the most common problems is that our art is full of separate islands. The sun might shine but the effect doesn’t show elsewhere. The person may smile but the eyes are not affected. There may be three ladies but what are their roles? Use your imagination to find connections between these islands and add elements that make the overall story make sense!
In my painting, there are not two women like in Edelfelt’s painting, but a rose, a leaf, and a feather – three introverts! The rose reaching for the sky has agreed to be the center point. The leaf examines herself through the pond. The feather has been a part of a bigger adventure and is now ready to shift the focus to others.
The small pond is a central element here. It brings the leaf and the feather together.
You can also see the colors of the rose elsewhere in the painting. For example, there are flying thoughts (red lines) that the rose tries to catch, and a bigger punch of roses that is in the background.
The painting is about three romantic introverts who went on a trip to a rocky forest on a lovely summer day. They are together, but in their own thoughts, just like the women in Albert Edelfelt’s painting.
When we paint or draw people, we hope to bring the character to life with their facial features. But we don’t need facial features to find an emotional connection. Once you get the hang of it, you can draw or paint anything, even just different shaped spots on paper.
What do you think?
