Acrylic and Oil Painting with Liquin Medium

This time I tried acrylic for the initial layer, and for the subsequent layers used the fast-drying oils with Liquin medium which is kind of gel-like and is said to be faster drying than the Siccatif de Courtrai that I used in the previous two paintings with fast-drying oils (both of which are still drying!). The painting was done in three sessions, on three consecutive days. On the final session, the oil colours I'd mixed the previous day were still active, but had dried a bit, and the oils already on the canvas were less willing to mix with any colour I painted over them. I liked this process, and it looks like acrylic and fast-drying oil with liquin will be the way for me to go in the future.

Aside from the tree, you'll notice I stuck fairly religiously to the vertical brush-stroke done with chisel edge brushes to prioritise composition and colour over form and texture.

Landscape in Acrylic and Oil Paint

Okay, so my plan for this one was to get the best of both mediums by using acrylic for the initial layering, and then, in the next session, paint over the top with oils. In this way the hope was to avoid having to do the first layer in oil, which demands you work from thin to thick. Also the plan was to avoid the annoying problem of any acrylic colour I mix drying up within about ten minutes and then having to remix that same colour when I need it again in the finishing stages, because any oil colours you mix remain active for the whole session (and maybe the next one with these fast-drying oils I'm using).

Looking at stage one and stage two here, I'm thinking that next time I might not bother being so careful and accurate with the acrylic layer, as I ended up hiding almost all of it anyway!

I did get a bit stuck on the second session, and realised it was because I was treating the oils like acrylics, and not utilising their best feature - the serendipitous nature of the way they can blend and intermix, and still remain active for when the finishing touches get put on, which is something I really like.

THE EEL (poem)

My mind is black,
my brain is an eel,
I am trying to spear it
so that I may feel

that light so clear,
so bright I can't see
that I swim in it now
as it swims in me.

A Glimpse into the Future

The thing I've struggled with in trying to find my path as an artist is that I like to do a variety of creative activities, and I like several different styles - so how best to bring all of these together in a tasteful way? I mean there's poetry, writing mind babble, free-drawing patterns, representational painting (especially people), abstract expressionist painting, drawing, doodling, collage...

Neo-Expressionist painting has given me so much inspiration, but the freedom it allows does, I think, need to be reigned in a bit so that I can put together a series of artworks with similar motifs, processes, colours and compositions. So today I did some studies of masks and faces, which I hope to make a unifying theme in my work, along with words, patterns and collage. I was able to put these studies (the central mask and the pieces in blue) with previous studies in order to look for a format which would unify them well and be practical for the space that I have to work in.

My problem was that I'd been thinking inside the square, almost literally, in wanting to use a regulation canvas frame size for this. But early afternoon I cut a thin strip (310mm/1000mm) of craft paper from a painting that I'd abandoned last year. I pinned its corners to the floor, put the mask down on top of a printout of a tiled pattern that I'd drawn and then modified on computer. I then shifted it to the middle, and added various other elements, and moved them around a bit until I landed on this assemblage. I haven't bothered sticking it all down, as I only did it to give me a vision and format of how I will go about future mixed-media works.

It's a small creative victory, but one which will help me a lot in the future. I now have the seed, and just need the time and money to make it grow!

Back to Some Neo-Expressionism

Spring is here and I had the yearning for some neo-expressionist process this morning. I'm putting the emphasis on faces and words as being the recurring motifs in my paintings, and am intentionally trying to make them look monstrous or naive in a stylised way. My representational paintings are about beauty, whereas these types of works are more about sublimity. These two are acrylic on paper, but my plan is to get some canvases going in the following months and hopefully build up a series for a show next year some time.

A portrait done with fast-drying oil paint

I have to admit that the incredibly fast drying time of acrylics has been kind of an obstacle to how I prefer to go about a painting. Since I taught myself to paint with oils, which I used to thin with mineral turpentine, it is just so much more of a natural process for me to be able to work on the painting as a whole, rather than by a section-by-section approach that acrylics force me into. I refuse to conform to teachable acrylic techniques, the like of which you can readily find on You-tube, as it's this sort of systematic "here's how to paint a cloud/tree/river" which put me off painting when I first tried it at high school. I left high-school with a hatred of painting, not realising that it was acrylics that I hated, and that painting can be so much more serendipitous than what you might call "drawings rendered with colour".

My move away from oils was due to the toxic nature of them and the drying time which tends to be about 6-7 days. So I went for a compromise and invested in a bunch of fast-drying oil paints. It seems to have taken the drying time down to about 3-4 days, and the paints themselves are just dandy.

Landscapes are not my favourite subject. I tend to prefer people - especially portraits, which I like to do from photos. This photo is of my friend and local multi-media artist Leben Young, who took a photo of himself and emailed it to me. I then adjusted it slightly on the computer to take away some of the contrast, and went and got a print. I kind of cropped the photo mentally as I drew the image onto the canvas. It took two lengthy sessions to complete, and I'm really happy with the result. I particularly like the white-over-blue background effect.