two from the past

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A painting just 16 x 20 cms dating from 1999 and made in oil pastel and acrylic ink. Rescued from my old slide archive and recently transferred to digital. Tretower is the subject, of course, though transposed to a fanciful, boulder-strewn landscape of the imagination. Interesting to see this piece from so early in my painting career as it’s remarkably similar to some of the collages I’ve been making recently. I recall being pleased with the defining edge of the foreground boulder, which looks as though it may have been cut from paper and stuck on, though it wasn’t. However I think it unlikely I’d make a sky that turbulent nowadays.

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Here’s another oil pastel and acrylic ink painting made at the same time. A strange (and not-to-be-repeated) composition, this, with the unmistakeable air of a stage set. Lots of sgraffito made with the tail-end of my brush, done fast before the ink dried. The clouds are painted ‘wet on wet’ over a resist of oil pastel, requiring speed and sureness. Once the brushstrokes are laid you can’t work into them or the colours blend and the whole effect turns to mud. Acrylic ink is the most demanding medium I ever attempted to master.  Click on the image below to see that the gradations of tone in the clouds are all applied in single, swift strokes of fat, soft, ink-laden Chinese brushes. Loading a brush prior to a stroke becomes fraught with the sense that if one tiny thing goes wrong then the painting will be lost. But when they can be made to work, the inks have a three dimensionality and a luminous buoyancy that’s most rewarding. Most of the paintings I made in this way were quite small because controlling the process made larger works very difficult to pull off.

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