For A Nosy Parker It’s An Interestin’ Job

The best of the rejected  ideas were:

– a landscape using the white areas as fence posts

– a landscape using the white areas as highlights on buildings

– a portrait using the white areas as eyes, noses or lips

– a figure drawing over the top that just ignored the white areas

– an abstract with some white lines added, holding the white areas in a web

In the end, though, I went for a window in what could be either one or two point perspective.  The existing white areas aren’t  incorporated into the window in any way, but I thought they might add a bit of movement, as if the window was spinning around.  I don’t think they did this in the end, but the way that a couple of them are converging towards the top left of the window does make it look as if there’s a different world on the other side.

 Anyway, starting from the underpainting, I first marked out a window using masking tape.  This involved cutting the tape into thin strips with scissors – I think this must have reduced the stickiness of the tape and allowed paint under it in places.  Anyway, once the tape was on, I painted over the window in French ultramarine and Prussian blue.  In some (but not all) places I added paint around the edge of the window to negatively paint the frame, being careful to fade out the edges.  The blue reinforced the positive energy in the painting resulting from the diagonal top left to bottom right composition.  I tried to brighten up the top left by adding more Indian yellow but this only seems to have dulled things down.  I threw on some salt but this doesn’t seem to have had much effect.  And I spattered on some cadmium red and cadmium yellow around the background, although it looks as if I didn’t wait long enough for the blue paint to dry in the top left first.

I don’t think this is one of my best abstracts, although I could see that coming after the underpainting.  The masking tape in the middle of that original painting was an error that I won’t repeat.   The window itself looks dirty now that blue’s been added but the bits that were covered in masking tape first time around look cleaner, which is why the name of the painting refers to cleaning windows.  There are lots of interesting colours and textures all over the painting though.  It’s up for sale.