The Light Water
This turquoise painting began its journey at the start of this month.
It now has about 3 – 4 layers on it.
When painting the first layer, the paint started to ‘sink’ towards the middle of the canvas again. At first I was disappointed with this persistent effect, and I started to manipulate it and discouraged the paint from settling in the middle.
I then had my crit with tutors and fellow students, and I talked about this continuing problem. The best solution seems to be to work on unframed canvas and then frame it once its finished, therefore working on a completely flat surface.
However.
One of my tutors suggested I could turn this problem into a positive and let the paint make vortex like shapes one the canvas.
So,
I decided to try this out on this turquoise painting. I made the canvas quite damp, and with some blue, white and green paint (keeping the colours light and calm), I poured it on to the canvas around all of the edges, and watched as it flowed into the middle.
I finished by adding a PVA layer which mixed with a little of the ink on the bottom layer and created a few ripple like shapes.
I love the finished image, it’s a much brighter painting than any other I’m working on at the moment. The name of this painting comes from a book I’m reading called ‘Pisces Rising’, where the area of the sea between the surface and about 100ft down or so is called the ‘light water’.
Coral Painting – Sanctuary
I took a slightly different approach to this painting. I wanted it to be very textured like rocks or coral.
With every layer of colour I mixed in some modelling paste with the paint, which becomes the visual texture on the canvas, but also made the entire layer dry with a matte finish, which is completely different to any of my other paintings.
I have already built up a lot of different colours, I wanted to mix in some bright colours to contrast against the dark ones.
Recently I discovered this artist, called Klari Reis. She uses techniques of science in her work. Here is a quote from the artist’s website:
‘she is driven by a curiosity and her desire to explore and document the natural and unnatural with a sense of wonder and joy’
http://www.klariart.com
All of last year she set herself a project called The Daily Dish, where she used a type of plastic (epoxy polymer / resin) to capture dyes and pigments inside a petri dish.
Reis is similar to Keith Tyson where she’s locking something in a particular state and time. You can see immense detail with tiny threads and shapes, which couldn’t be painted by hand, the material has formed itself. Though they are tiny, they are so similar to Tyson’s Nature Paintings, which are huge.
Reis’s work reminded me of some of my old work I did in college. I used a much simpler process of ink on wet paper. That series of work was purely about experimenting but came up with some attractive results. In my work at the moment I have gone back to using wetter materials like ink and watercolours.
Twilight Zone
I recently did a new layer on my big painting, which I have now called Twilight Zone. This comes from an episode of David Attenboroughs Blue Planet, where he talks of about 300ft down under the sea where the light from the sun is just about gone, this area is called the Twilight Zone.
The paint that I added was mainly around the edges to hide the areas where you could still see the bare canvas. Though I also let that paint run into the middle and then I manipulated some of the spills into one another to form rivers. I am still keeping the colours to just a few (Blue, Purple, Green and Black).
A conversation with some fellow students involved the topic of varnishing again. I will varnish this painting, though I am a bit anxious as I have never used a proper varnish before, I normally just use PVA. Though last time I used PVA it mixed with the ink on the painting and formed dark shapes on the surface, and though that effect looks interesting on that painting, I am unsure how it would look on a large scale and on an already dark painting.
I hope a varnish will do the job well and I know never to use that ink on my paintings again!
Lilac Sediment
After this painting had dried I wanted a gloss finish so I added a layer of PVA.
I have to admit when applying it I was confused as to why a yellowy brown pigment was coming through into the PVA and causing it to separate, but I thought it would still dry normally.
The next day I came in and found my painting had not dried normally.
Instead the glue had dried in its separate little globules and had kept this pigment (which I now realise was the ink I used on one of the bottom layers) encased in these little shapes, causing this pigment to dry in these ripple like shapes.
Though it could be likened to leopard print…
I really quite like it, some of the shapes have a slight shimmer to them and they give the painting a more watery feel.
