Number nine is not number nine yet might be the first finished

This is the first piece that I think might be finished. It is the first one where I am happy with both the balance and number of elements. To begin, I laminated a bunch of dead notebook pages onto one part of the canvas. A few days later I began the plastering layer. Rather than wait for that to dry, I immediately painted into and over it but was unhapy with the results. When I added more, it got worse. I then mixed some drawing ink and PVA and splatted that around and about. It got worse again.

At this point I was on the verge of giving up on this one and letting it dry completey, before painting over the whole thing and starting again. Instead, I got out the palette knife and mashed everything together, except for the stringy black PVA strands. These I picked off and dumped over the notebook pages.

Oddly, this last-ditch, f**ck-it approach pulled everything together. So I added in the blank Instax photo, a few more orange splashes to balance things out and left it to dry. The next day I knew that it needed a large number 9 in the corner (I added two) and then a few more odds and ends.

The two most sucessful features for me where the last two added. The penultimate was the ink drawing, based on a light-trail photo I took last year. I've been trying to work drawings into my paintings since canvas A but this is the first time I feel it has really worked.

The final element, and the one I'm most excited by today, is that orange-ish strip in the centre. It is a long slot cut through the canvas, cross-stitched and backed with a mis-printed photo. The photo is stuck on the back in a D-shape, giving depth.

I've had this idea of cutting into the canvas in my head for many months, yet this is the first time I've put it into practice. It has worked exactly as I had hoped it would. This is great because I've got quite a few more variations on this idea I want to explore. So watch this space.

Canvas C

I thought for this painting, I'd try a little harder to keep track of the stages it goes through. The previous two works-in-progress that I have uploaded here don't give quite as clear an indication of how they progressed, concentrating, as the mostly do, on details. Therefore this time I set out to make a record of the pregoress of this painting.

First up is the simple plaster background layer, with the main 'erosion' drips running across it. Once this layer hard dried, I cut out a space for the instax self portrait photo.

Next up is the lettering layer and a splash of black ink and some other little odds and ends.
Finally there is a skyline drawing, filled below with a faint dark wash. This is overworked with some strips of a mis-printed photo and some oil and water colour mixing. There is also probably more ink here.

As with the previous two canvases, this piece is not finished. I'm still feeling my way about with this and don't yet know where it will go. Right now I am in two minds about this piece. On one hand I like the more obvious layering of elements, which is one of the things I've been trying to achieve. On the other hand, it feels somehow like a student project, a little amateurish, maybe even slightly tacky. I can't put my finger on exactly what is giving me this impression, whether it is the overyl clashing colours or just that there are two many disparate elements. I'm going to have to think about this one for a while, before I come back to it.

Ekranoplan

English Russia » Ekranoplan

Check the link. Many, many more shots of this bizarre beast.

Canvas B

I started this one last week, you may recognise a small part of it. Since then, I've added quite a bit to it.
My primary intent here is to try to marry painting and photography. This is not the only method I've thought of for trying this, but it is the first to make it onto canvas. I'm not certain of its sucess. I'm also uncertain as to whether or not to work on this piece more. There are several parts of this that I like, however it doesn't feel finished yet.

As with canvas A, I'm going to put this away for a while and come back to it. (By which point I'm sure I'll be really wishing I had got the b straight.

Overcooked

Canvas 'A', as I am rather obviously calling this at the moment, has been simmering away for a few weeks. I think I might have been cooking it too long. There was a point last week when I was happier with it but I've gone past it now. What I really need to do now is to put it away somewhere for a few weeks and come back to it fresh. Maybe it will be cleared then.

Lagrangian point

I've spent ten years filtering my creativity though the ordered side of my personality; the chaotic side was utterly banished. It was never a conscious choice, in fact almost entirely the opposite. I became disconnected from my art because it was an expression of only half of who I was – an utterly ordered person is not the same at all as one who walks the line between order and chaos.

An Lagrangian point is a point in space between two astral bodies where their gravitational pulls are equal and so cancel each other out. A third body placed at this point will be attracted towards neither and will remain stationary. This is where I want to be, in between order and chaos, feeling the pull of both but moving towards neither.

A happy 'accident'

For the past few weeks, I've tinkered away with the brown painting. Some time during the middle of this week, even though it is by no means finished, I put it aside to begin work on a new piece. Firstly, it felt like the brown painting needed a little time alone to simmer but secondly, and more importantly, there was something new I really wanted to try. It stemmed from a conversation I had last month with my friend Richard, when he suggested that one way for me to move forward may be to try to combine my painting and photograpy. Since then, I've thought of several ways to do so and this new painting is going to be mt first attempt at acheiving this.

For this post, I'm going to put that aside to concentrate on a small detail that I am enjoying particularly on this new piece. This idea was lifted from one of the things that happened on the brown canvas.

What I've tried to do here is to bleed one of my lovely, lovely orange paints out of titanium white, to wash across the canvas. A river of orange, so to speak. Later I added in some black ink, which has rather taken over. However the ink is water-soluable and is unlikely to remain where it is for long.

I like both the startlingly stark colour combination, against the relatively plain background, and the way that the colour cuts through the background texture.

Of course, looking at it again, I realise that it looks like I have a pet bird that eats orange paint and likes to stand on the edges of my paintings…