This week I've been experimenting more with oil paint, since I haven't used it much before and am not sure how to go about it. For the soft toy study, which my tutor suggested for me to do, I did a purple layer of acrylic first, and began to vaguely map out the shapes of the toys on top with pup paint. I barely used any oil medium as I realised it thins the color out a bit. I didn't draw on a guide beforehand, but surprisingly the forms don't look to bad. I feel like a slightly wrong proportion of the image is interesting to look at anyway. Since I've never really used oil much before, I'm winging how I color each form. With ink you just let it do its job but oil paint you really do need to mix right colors and make conscious decisions of where to put paint. As thick paint is quite foreign to me, this was quite challenging and scary, but in the end it was enjoyable. On Friday I did a second layer of oil paint after the first layer dried slightly, and the way I started to involuntarily color it became more and more abstract, not to the image. Now, the bag looks more fleshy than normal, but I think I like the effect.
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| I had my bag of plushies (soft toys) with me (from the photoshoot in the woods) and will said that is a sculpture in itself... |
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| I also put my smaller figurines onto my 'buy happiness' painting and it was quite interesting |
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| flash?! maybe I'll do some studies of this too. I love the idea of enlarged animals or toys. |
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| probably unfinished, but I don't hate how unfinished it looks. oil painting is actually quite fun. |
When I was waiting for the first layer to dry I also started another quick experiment - this time with very thick oil paint, and with a palette knife for most of the applying. It was extremely liberating. I didn't plan on what I wanted to paint at all, which is what I usually do. However, the idea for it came naturally as I was placing each slab of paint on the wood. The violent red and white was fire-like, the blue forms, originally squares, grew into watch-like floating forms. The biggest rectangle on the side turned into a somewhat humanoid figure. I wanted to play around with how to incorporate text into a painting, since my tutor suggested for me to do it, and I agree that there are definitely more engaging methods of writing text into a painting than just blatantly writing it on with a thin black brush like how I did before. Anyway, I carved out 'BURN TILL YOUR TEETH FALL OUT' in the thick white paint and I love the subtle effect it has, contrasted with its capitalization. I thought of the text as I was painting, in relation to the forms.
The line 'don't let the fire die...' from owl city's wonderful song Embers was circling in my mind...
BURN TILL YOUR TEETH FALL OUT sounds quite negative and violent but that's not what it means at all, at least when I thought it. I was thinking 'fire' as in, the 'passion', the 'will' to stay alive. So, keep chasing your purpose in life, don't let that spark die, keep going until 'all your teeth fall out', til you inevitably meet old age and wither away as still-warm ashes.
(& yes, I guess the vague blue forms could be representing time as watches and the human being as a strange figure)
BURN TILL YOUR TEETH FALL OUT sounds quite negative and violent but that's not what it means at all, at least when I thought it. I was thinking 'fire' as in, the 'passion', the 'will' to stay alive. So, keep chasing your purpose in life, don't let that spark die, keep going until 'all your teeth fall out', til you inevitably meet old age and wither away as still-warm ashes.
(& yes, I guess the vague blue forms could be representing time as watches and the human being as a strange figure)
I also started on another quick painting just to test out how I could represent text in a more subtle way as Will suggested. With a small primed MDF board I wondered what I was going to paint. I was just staring at the rough brushstrokes of the white gesso, and was quite attracted to how they flowed into each other. So I just followed what I already saw on the board. Working in different layers and stages I used watercolor, gouache for the darker parts, and even oil. The mistake I made somewhat consciously here is that I tried to put watercolor onto the already-dried oil color. I knew it would be waterproof, but my urge to place another color on top of this made it happen - the very watery and thin water color spread out into smaller patches as it spread over the oily layer. I actually quite liked the rejection of mediums and the dissipating (but still existing) color stretched thin over the thicker coating. I think I may be slightly influenced by Jules de Balincoourt's paintings of exploration (at least thats how it felt to me - I felt that I was walking into the imaginary? real? places he depicts, trying to decipher some sort of meaning out of that realm) when I wrote 'I WAS HERE THERE EVERYWHERE' - I guess I was conveying the desperate NEED of leaving a mark of where I was, and the void you left when you weren't THERE when I was. Who this 'you' is, I don't know. I use 'you' a lot and I feel it's as much generalising as it is talking to someone specific/personal. It's direct and to the point yet it could mean anyone. Anyway, as I was painting colors feeding off what I saw in the gesso, I also saw animal - like forms, the bunny and a bird, and I tried to emphasise what I saw already in the swishing hues.
