Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, Where Did Your Garden Go?

For my second stripy gesso experiment, I thought I’d better try it out with inks.  The gesso stripes this time are slanted, top right to bottom left, and there’s also some gesso spattering in there.  There’s also even more salt (but not flour) added to it than on the last painting.

The primary colours this time were light red, French ultramarine and Indian yellow: the choices of red and yellow were based on a strategic decision to paint this one in the key of orange.  Not that it ended up that way.  I also used some sepia and raw sienna when I added the house at the end.  I used three ink colours: sepia, earth red and indigo.  I don’t remember adding any colour to the cloud behind the tree – whatever colour it is in there is just a lucky accident.

The conclusion from the experiment was that ink, gesso and salt don’t work together.  The inks didn’t run into the salty gesso (who would have thought it?) and had to be brushed into it instead.  This is something I don’t enjoy doing as inks should be free to do whatever they want.  So maybe I need to experiment again with ink and gesso but no salt.  Or maybe I should experiment with gesso stripes, salt and watercolour but no ink as the texture of the salty gesso looks really good here.  Not just in the rocks but also in the sky – I do like the big blue stripe just to the right of the middle, with its dark blue blemish and with the unpainted bit of salty gesso at the bottom.

Compositionally, the trees, the house and the fence were added at the end after I’d seen what the ink had done.  It took me ages to get the house looking right.  I’m glad I thought of adding the fence – without that, things weren’t hanging together.  I’m also pleased that I painted in the trees with a rigger (rather than using ink in a pipette) and my conscious decision to have three unevenly spaced trees with one of them in front of the other two was a good one.

This isn’t my best one in this run of paintings but is up for sale.