The Sea Fit

After doing that first painting, it felt too early to be stopping but I didn’t have enough painting capacity within me to do another landscape, so I thought I’d do one of those abstract underpaintings where I leave it overnight to dry and then think about what I can turn it into.

Today, I started with masking fluid.  I put on lots of spatters but the had the idea of adding some big blobs and blowing them sharply through a straw to make them explode, so I did that too.  As I was putting on the blobs, I noticed that some bits of the masking fluid had congealed into wet and slippery sausages attached to the (rubbishy old) brush that I use for masking fluid.  So I dragged these around, resulting in the white lines you can see.  When the fluid dried, I rubbed gently against some of the fluid in the middle of the explosions to leave small gaps for paint to seep in.

Then on went the colours.  I used quinacridone magenta, Winsor red, Prussian blue, French ultramarine, transparent yellow and a little cerulean blue and rose dore.  I quickly threw on some salt, put on four screwed up squares of toilet paper, covered it all with bubble wrap and French stick wrapper and weighed it down.

Today was a hot day though, and everything dried quickly so I’ve already unwrapped it.  And found that everything had worked.  The salt, the masking fluid, the holes in the masking fluid, the toilet paper, the French stick wrapper,  the bubble wrap and the colours. Everything has made its presence felt.

At this point I’d normally think about the painting overnight.  What it looks like, what it can be turned into.  I guess it could be rotated 90 degrees to the left to get some sort of hunchbacked bogeyman figure that I could negatively paint but would this really make the painting better?  I don’t think it would.  I’m just going to leave it as it is: I won’t even add spatters of opaque paint over the top.  I think it looks best this way round in landscape format but all four orientations possible.  And I’ve gone to my trusty list of Algernon Blackwood short stories to pick a name.

This one’s up for sale.