Work 8/22–8/25

Starting to add some color to the underpainting. Oil.

I did a bad job of documenting this. Here is a brief explanation: working with 2 12" squares and a 12"x24 rectangle it was my intention to replace the bottom left corner of one of the red portrait started this past spring as I want the original for another composition.  The panels were given a green coat of acrylic and than some tape patterning and rotating of the panels occurred. The ultimate result of these efforts was than incorporated into the bottom corner as depicted below.

This is not working well at the moment, really it looked better before the portrait was reworked back onto the new panels. Not sure if there is too much pattern happening throughout  the piece or if it is an issue of the revised corner of the portrait being underdeveloped, but something feels very straight forward and lacking of interest. 

Work from 8/15 - 8/18

Prepared surface ready for another oil sketch.

Getting ready to do some pattern work, masking tape starting to be applied. Some work was also done to the portrait that you can see peaking out from behind the pattern piece.

Oil Pattern

Below are a series of shots showing the first attempt at working with creating a tape and oil paint pattern.

Tape mask applied.

Oil paint applied and mask removed.

Preparing to spay Turpenoid on the paint in a effort to get it to swirl and run.

Too much spraying and swirling. You can see the spay bottle of turpenoid on the back edge of the panels. I think I had the paint on too thick to get what I had in mind to work, plus I went overboard with the turp. I had seen this video and it made me want to try it out in my studio. (It's a 19 minute video and the portion that I am referring to does not occur until about 15 or 16 minutes in, if you have the time the entire video is interesting.) The artist Jorge Pombo was doing this with an image of Istanbul that he had painted, but I thought I could apply it to the geometric, hard edged patterning I have been doing. I'll try it again with less paint, a little more dry time before spraying, and less turp when I do.

24 hours after spraying it, the oil paint is still very wet despite the amount of turp sprayed onto it.

Forgot to photograph the second tape mask applied to the wet paint, but this image shows the result of some white oil that was worked into the wet ochre color and than sprayed again. I liked how the tape mask removed the wet oil from the surface when it was removed yielding soft edged line.

B A N A N A S

Looking for a way to add some textural and painterly contrast in some of the imagery led me to breaking out the oils and attempting to refresh myself on how to work with them. Working on a few clumps of bananas suspending from the ceiling over a period of several days. I've noticed several artists online lately that combine acrylic and oil and my thought is that there may be a way for me to use oil as a way to add a top layer to some of the pieces that provides another level of visual interest.