Yesterday I kicked off an abstract painting. I put on some masking tape and some…
A Desert Episode
In that last painting, Six Ways To Look At The Moon, I was so pleased with how the bottom left subpainting turned out that I thought I’d have a go at painting something similar but full sized. So I marked out a border with masking tape, then tore off several random bits of tape and stuck them down. There was something there looking like a palm tree, so I deliberately added the piece of tape that I guess you’d call the top half of the trunk. I also added a couple of “islands” near the bottom – horizontal bits of tape with the straight side along the bottom. Otherwise, all the tape is pretty random but with an eye towards composition. Not too many close together but not evenly spread. A couple of strips that are not quite parallel. That sort of thing.
Then I spattered over a load of masking fluid. I didn’t want to just make the original subpainting bigger without adding anything extra.
The idea was to stop there and carry on tomorrow but I was on a roll. So I wet the paper and randomly added French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta, Indian yellow and transparent yellow. The paper had buckled a bit, so I tried to dab out the most liquid bits. I found myself doing a few more unnecessary dabs for a bit of interest. And then I let it dry, throwing on salt whenever any bits of the coed optimal salvage levels of dryness. Of the what! Damn that autocorrect!
And here’s the final result. The best bits about it are the interesting salt effects. In particular there’s some interesting granulation in the purple in the bottom left, with the red and blue separating in places. Where I’m less than 100% happy, it’s in where the colours haven’t run together as much as I’d have liked. Indian yellow in particular seems loathe to run into other colours and maybe needed some encouragement with the brush. Mind you, the blue and red have no excuse for not running into the Indian yellow. There’s no right way to hang this one. I think it looks better this way round (something to do with having so many horizontal shapes) even if that vertical shape looms nothing like a palm tree. But is it any good? I’m not convinced. This one isn’t going up for sale.
Needless to say, the name for this one is shared with an Algernon Blackwood short story.
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