Studio Time

This is the beginning of one of several paintings I’ve done that recall a fairly distant memory of that mysterious machine in the back yard of many homes.

Many of my relatives… Great Grandma, my Great Aunts and Uncles and so on, lived in “country” homes, way back when. Usually a small plot of land, farmhouse, gardens and grapevines, chickens, an occasional pony, tumble-down wooden sheds that were the source of all sorts of magic and mystery in my young mind and, in one case, a bunch of peacocks that delighted in chasing me around the back yard. (Not to mention a few bomb shelters.)

In pretty much every case… there was some sort of bizarre, rusted machine, behind one of the sheds or just sitting in the middle of the garden: an ancient thresher, an old stove, a dead tractor… even the rusted out shell of an old Morris Minor, sitting just on the other side of a deteriorating barbed wire fence. Some things I had no clue about but developed a sort of curious infatuation with anyway.

…That’s my intent here, anyway. I’m not sure if I can pull it off with this one. The other paintings are much more “machine-like”. They include gears and mechanisms, legs, wheels and so on. With this one, I want to see if I can capture some of that in a purely abstract form.

Of course, I’ve started out with an automatic drawing. The colors in the sketch are just whatever tubes I had of Open Acrylics that were the least used. It gives me an idea of tones and colors to use to develop things and clarifies a few of the areas in which there are a lot of lines… keeps them from getting lost in the process.

The ground was canvas that I tinted with various blue and green acrylics. It probably qualified as “raw” before I stated working on it. The drawing is done with watercolor pencils… something I usually seal before moving on to the painting. This time I used a combination of water and acrylic colors to block things in. The watercolor pencil blends nicely into the acrylic and bleeds into the fabric. It makes it really easy to shade things and helps define the lines themselves. There are a few grey shapes on the lower left that are done purely with water… The whole thing’s been sealed with a couple of coats of clear acrylic medium then sanded.

The plan is to use mostly Mars colors which are pigments made from (synthetic) iron oxides (rust) to start things out. We’ll see how it goes. If it works, I want to try integrating machine parts into a future piece.