Original artwork description:

Most paintings, apart from some abstracts, have distinct backgrounds, but, alas, like background music, background scenes in a painting tend to go unnoticed - they are just dull, uninteresting filler, like elevator tunes. Look at The Mona Lisa or The Girl with the Pearl Earring for proof of this. Boring! Munch's The Scream is an exception - that whole painting is foreground. Ah but backgrounds shouldn't take attention away from the main subject I hear you say. Why not!? That's an excuse for laziness. Details matter. However a lazy background is not the case here, where, in theory, the background should be the foreground. When a camera lens distorts the lights of a city the effect is called bokeh and many artists, including myself, paint bokeh pictures. The bokeh effect is colourful, abstract, fun. I could have stopped with this background-should-be-foreground work and have created a perfectly decent bokeh painting. But I've been there, done that. So I've misted up and put the lights behind a damp window because art, like life, isn't always nice and tidy! Sometimes it rains! Or as Brandon Boyd puts it: 'Art is everywhere, and everywhere is art.'

Materials used:

Acrylics

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