Hedy Lamarr

Today’s painting is a portrait of the actress Hedy Lamarr. I saw a photo of her and the highlights and shadows were just screaming out to be painted. It turns out she was more than just an actress, though: she was coinvented something called frequency hopping, without which we wouldn’t have wifi today, something I was quite shocked by.

I’ve used crystalline watercolours for this one, following my usual process of

• masking out highlights
• sprinkling crystals into the dark areas and pinging through them with a brush: today I used grey violet, plum violet, orange grey and olive green in those areas
• sprinkling crystals in the mid tone areas, spraying generously with water and quickly dabbing off the excess water with kitchen paper: today I used buttercup, poppy red, leaf green and sap green in those areas. I also sprayed on more water than usual this time and tried to encourage it to move round with directional spraying.
• removing the masking fluid

I’d been a bit careless in putting down the original pencil marks and left some paint marks in what was supposed to be a white background, so I painted over the whole background with cadmium red, an opaque colour from the opposite side of the colour wheel to the greens that were dominating the painting.

So how’s the final painting? Strangely unsettling. It’s that cadmium red background. Being a warm colour, it advances when the artist and viewer want it to recede. And the only way for the brainstorming cope with this is to try to tell us that the portrait has been cut out of a magazine or newspaper with a pair of scissors and stuck in a scrapbook. It’s an interesting effect and maybe something to use deliberately another day. Anyway, this one’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.

That’s 15 paintings in the month of June. I might take a couple of days off.