This is one of the paintings featured in the most recent Arnet newsletter.
🙂 I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Category: Automatism
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Marian (a version)
This is Marian (a version). A painting I did for the first time back in 1989. It’s based on the song by the Sisters of Mercy. Originally, Marian was floating above an airbrushy ocean… as per the song lyrics. Version 2 was sometime in the ’90s. I changed the background to a sort of greyish, drippy, abstract thing. I did this version a few years back. It’s 28×22 inches, oil on muslin that’s adhered to a hardboard panel. I’ve been forbidden to sell it. 🙂 It is one of several paintings that I’ve done with the same “figure”.
Somehow, this is just crying out for another version…
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Paint
It’s been a while. I figured it might be better if I waited until this showed some actual progress and this style of painting is extremely slow going. It took a while before you could clearly see what’s going on. ( 🙂 I’m not sure if it’s all that clear yet.)
Colors here are Rembrandt’s Cadmium Red Light, Winsor Newton’s Cobalt Turquoise and Terra Rosa and a combination of Liquitex’s Magnesium Blue, Sennelier’s Titanium White and Winsor Newton’s Purple Madder. The light blue is a combination of Sennelier’s Titanium White and Phthalocyanine Blue with Winsor Newton’s Cobalt Turquoise. It’s actually a little more green than it is in the photo.
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Glaze
🙂 I’m back to shooting in the dark again.
I covered this with a “glaze” of Sennelier’s Ultramarine Rose, followed by a bit of shading with their Ultramarine Violet yesterday. I’ll call it a glaze though the paint is so transparent that it doesn’t actually require much medium.
This is actually this dark. The actual painting is a bit more violet though. Once the paint had dried a bit, I went over it with a rag and sort of daubed at it to get rid of any brush strokes and add a mottled texture. It did give some consistency to things and the surface is a little easier to paint small details onto now that it’s covered with oil. It is very glossy. I’m surprised I was able to get this clean a photograph of it.
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Underpainting
Several Hard Bop playlists and a half dozen or so Tangerine Dream albums later… this is the finished underpainting. Much of it is painted as “every other shape”. I tried to leave as much of the noise from the watercolor wash and the gradients from the airbrush work as possible. Watercolor is basically pigment with a bit of gum arabic to hold it on the paper. Coated with acrylic… it’s pretty much the same thing as an acrylic painting. The pigments are reasonably lightfast.
Basically, this clarifies stuff and gives me an idea as to where to take things. I gave it a couple of coats of clear acrylic and am letting it dry overnight.
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Started
There are definitely times when I question my own sanity. Frequently, those questions come at about this stage of one of these paintings. This painting is no different.
This represents several hours of filling in tiny shapes with an equally tiny paint brush. I decided to use acrylics this time seeing that it saves me waiting for things to dry. This is just the start of the underpainting. It will be finished in oil
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Start
Given that I just finished 3 pieces and have several others close… I decided to treat myself and start a new one. This is 22×28 inches, which just happens to be the size of my largest, empty drawing board. It’s on Arches oil paper. This first image is the thing covered with a watercolor wash of Sennelier’s Chinese Orange as well as Winsor Newton’s Cerulean Blue and Brown Madder. I tossed some salt on it to give it the texture.
After letting it dry for a day, I scrubbed off the salt. Half an eraser later… I did the automatic drawing/scribble you see here with watercolor pencils.
In an effort to sort of speed things up, I used an airbrush and the same colors I used to start things as well as Winsor Newton’s Dioxazine Purple to begin defining some of this. This image is taken after I put a light coat of U.V protective sealer on things.
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A Difference of Opinion
I finished this yesterday… mostly. It still needs to be re-stretched. The painting itself is done for now.
This is 12×18 inches; oil on some fairly heavy canvas. Strangely, it was easier to keep things crisp and clean than it has been with paper. I’d expect the opposite. I’m going to attribute that to the glaze I did a while back.
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Chaos
I managed to finish another of these today. It’s a representation of “chaos” as opposed to the somewhat more ordered “anarchy” of the last image.
12×18, oil on Arches oil paper
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Psychic Anarchism
These things take forever. Mainly because I just work on them a little bit at a time. It doesn’t take long before there’s no place to rest my hand and I really don’t like using mahl sticks. I have a dozen of them or so going at the moment so I can just move on to the next one when one gets “full”. I have two more that are probably a session away from being finished. I’ll probably post them in the next day or so.
These are basically automatic drawings that I decided to treat as abstracts rather than using them to create figures and so on. The drawing for this one was digitally manipulated and re-printed on Arches oil paper. It’s 12×18 inches.
Studio Time 