I didn’t have the patience to finish this painting tomorrow! So I went ahead and worked on it wet. This wet on wet process will have had an affect on the look of the finished painting, which is interesting. It’ll have that glossy, visceral look.
I wanted to cover some of the bottom part of the painting with the background colour. So I used two big brushes to do this, one to apply the paint quite thickly and one to blend with no paint on the brush. I ended up blending the paint so that the gestural brushmarks blend seamlessly with the totally blurred blue. This is interesting! The viewer doesn’t know what is appearing from where. A close up:
Finished painting:
I added this final red mark in this curving shape. I mixed the paint with lots of liquin so that the paint underneath would be minimally smudged. This curving shape is great. Moving inwardly it acts as some sort of shifting frame for the mass of brush marks.
If I had more time, I would have waited for these marks to dry and added more blue background to cover the bottom bit of the mass of brush marks, to mesh the background with the mass a little better. But perhaps the fact that I don’t have time to do that is a good thing! It means I can’t overwork the piece.
This painting has been really successful as a first colour attempt at this existential idea of stepping outside of my lived experience.
The painting is very much inline with the larger charcoal sketch on the bottom right of this photo of my studio wall:
They both deal with the idea of a recorded lived experience being witnessed as an external viewer.
I am really excited about pushing this composition forward next term. I’m thinking it might be worth looking at the Surrealist painters? Since they paint objects into imaginary landscapes?
I am most excited about the digital edit I did of the painting and the sculpture:
The way the line of the studio floor marks the horizon line in the landscape, and the structure appearing and disappearing from the brushstroke mass is interesting. There is something about this edit and the painting, and the idea of the structure being photographed in a blank space to mimic a larger landscape (when there is nothing around the structure to define scale) that is an exciting starting point for next term.
Finished painting
Georgina Harris 