A return to Paint Party Friday

 

It has been a very long time, but now with my brand new website, I’m returning to my favourite challenge, Paint Party Friday! And I actually have something to share 😀

One of the earliest paintings I experimented with was a painting I called ‘Circles’, basically because that is what it was.

 

It was one of my first experiments in acrylic mediums and mixed media. The technique involved pouring self-levelling gel onto the canvas, dropping fluid acrylic into the gel and swirling it around. In fact, I even made a video of it, I was that enthusiastic.

Wow, that needs some severe editing, ugh.

Circles was never fully completed and sits on a corner of my art desk gathering dust. However, it did spawn a sequel which developed into one of my first sold paintings, Autumn Wind, currently residing in New South Wales, Australia.

I was fascinated with creating colour and texture, painting over it and creating little windows. By painting over the texture and leaving those windows, it created depth and movement…and pursued my interest in highlighting the small and beautiful – each of those little windows framed a patch of texture, catching the viewer’s eye and enabling them to see the small details  that would have otherwise been missed if the underpainting had been viewed as a whole.

Flash forward a couple of years to early 2014…

We studied colour fields in art class in first term. The word colour is one of my favourites and drifting completely off the topic I ended up with this…

Hmm, a blurry phone photo. First layer…

And another blurry phone photo…I am Instagram’s slave nowadays. This it the second layer in progress.

 

And here we have the completed painting, Firestorm I, acrylic on canvas, approx. 250 x 250mm. It was a very similar technique to Autumn Wind, minus the self-leveling gel. The focus was also different. The texture, while still a part of it, took a backseat to some colour theory and experimentation. My aim in this was to emphasize analogous colours (those beside each other on the colour wheel) and combine that with complementary colours (those opposite on the colour wheel). Basically yellow, orange, red and purple reside beside each other on the colour wheel in that order and are harmonious. However, if you flip the order of the colours and lay them next to each other we encounter the fact that yellow and purple are direct opposites and spark off each other. I’m quite happy with this little painting. The question was what to do with it – it is too small really to sell by itself and seems a little lost. Consequently the ‘I’ was added to the name and this happened…

My first triptych! This is what I have been working on this week. The blue one in the foreground is heading towards finished and the green one has its first layer (its top layer is going to be red and a little eyeball popping if it works well).

This is the first time I’ve seen them together and I am quite excited at how well they work already. I have a deadline – they have to be finished by the end of next week because I want to line them up for an exhibition 😀

Speaking of exhibitions…I have three lined up in the next three months, one each for July, August and September I have entered a painting or two into each. You never know I might even sell something 😀 Even if I don’t they will all be valuable experience…and exciting times 😀

Oh, as for the Circles series (as it is turning out to be), there is another painting in progress that follows this experiment. Started it while on holiday by the beach, haven’t touched it since I got back, but I haven’t forgotten it…

See if you can find the fish 😀

Don’t forget to jump over to Paint Party Friday…I know I certainly will be, to get re-aquainted with those fabulous artists!

Best wishes,
Liz