The Touch Of Pan

Something a bit different today. This frying pan was going to be thrown out and replaced so I thought I’d grab it and paint it.

if I was doing this properly, I’d have sanded down the inside of the pan first but instead I pi ted watercolour ground all over the inside, then changed my mind and painted crackle paste over the top of the ground. Then I embedded some bobble wrap and ridged cardboard and a satsuma netting bag and left it all to dry overnight. Then today I pulled out all the textural bits and looked at what they’d created. It looked like they might work as a tree, so I started painting it that way. It was already looking a mess, but I then added acrylic inks and granulation medium, hoping it would settle in the cracks to show them off but all it did was create mud everywhere.

So I let it dry and then switched to a different idea. I divided pan into random shapes and coloured them in bright colours: Winsor blue (green shade), French ultramarine, viridian, a purple made from French ultramarine and quinacridone magenta, cadmium yellow (contaminated by green or blue in places), cadmium red and an orange made up of the two cadmiums. I sprinkled on some salt but it didn’t create anything interesting. And to finish I separated the shapes with white gouache, and added some white blobs and connected them together with white lines. And that was me done.

I quite like why I’ve ended up with. The colours are great and there are some interesting textures there, even if there are no cracks in the crackle paste. With the blues and the violet being near the top, green and yellow long the bottom and a bat-like shape in the French ultramarine shape at the top, this could even be a landscape with a red, orange, green and yellow tree or building in the middle and a starry constellation in the sky, partly hidden by the horizon. Makes you wonder whether this was all planned. Anyway, this one’s up for sale. Obviously not to be used for cooking with all those cadmium paints in there.

And it was easy to pick out an Algernon Blackwood short story to name this one after.