I’ve been busy the last few days – it occurred to me that there might be limited opportunity to really get into painting abstracts over most of the coming year, as I have several mainly landscape painting trips to work on, and a big exhibition of landscape work in the late Summer. So I’ve decided to let myself mad for a week or two on a series of abstracts, before I get embroiled in all that.
I did a painting some time back called ‘Treasures Beneath’ which had come from imagination after playing with my daughters, talking of tales of mermaids, selkies and underwater adventures. This shot off to a new home quite quickly after being finished, so I didn’t spend much time with it, but the idea stuck with me. I’ve wanted since to explore again the notions of what might lie under the ocean, briefly glimpsed and enchantingly enticing…
I had a large canvas in stock in the studio, waiting for a project. I love working large more than anything, but due to constraints of space and storage (and, to be fair, the state of the economy and wondering if folk really have the cash for such large extravagances) I tend not to allow myself to work big too often. I thought I’d let myself have fun with it though for this series – it’s 30 x 40″ so reaches my shoulder almost (I’m only tiny). I’d work even bigger if there was a way I could justify it!
‘Treasures Beneath 2’ came about after scrubbing out and painting over pretty much the whole thing at least once in full, and partially a few times over too – but I’m happy with the final result. It’s fairly powerful – but I wanted to get that feel of the powerful ocean (the others so far have gone more towards the ethereal).
Treasures Beneath 3 is so far a work in progress, I’m not 100% sure about it so have set it apart for a while…
Treasures Beneath 4 is a little 8 x 10″ canvas that was done in between working on TB #2, just because I needed to focus on something else.
TB #5 (excuse the short hand!) was a 36 x 12″ canvas I had stacked in the corner of the studio, previously half started as a completely different painting which I’d given up on, I obliterated the colours and just used the existing surface textures to suggest where I might go with the new, ocean-appropriate colours. I’m really pleased with how it came together – you can spot a few warm-colour hints poking through from the previous painting, and I added some subtle red highlights too to play on this.
The sixth painting was a fun experiment that I’d been waiting to try for a while… I often paint using rags, bubble wrap, bits of plastic, scrunched paper bags, etc but I’d never laid down a whole initial layer of paint using screwed up plastic. It’s desperately messy but I found allows you to move the paint in a way you just can’t with a brush / palette knife / paper / rags. There were some area’s I wasn’t totally happy with at the end, where the paint had missed or I felt the colour / tone wasn’t quite as I’d like, but these were easily sorted by applying glazes to bring it all together and to a nice finish – as did adding some metallic paint.
The last TB painting I’ve finished so far, number seven, came from a desire to stay fully within the cool side of the spectrum – I’m not sure it quite worked that way as the colour I was finally happy with having mixed for the first layer on the canvas has quite a bit of cadmium red in it. Nevertheless, it worked. There’s quite a bit of surface texture under the paint so I decided to keep the mark making quite simple and let this play through.
I’ve a couple more canvases on the go just now in the studio, so I shall see where they go and post an update in a few days…