Path To The Lake

I was in an experimental mood today.  I dug out the gesso and thought I’d have a go at applying it to the paper in stripes rather than all over.  In this painting, I applied it in vertical stripes, added some salt and, in a moment of madness, some plain flour.

And after it dried, I did a painting on it.  I put zero thought into the subject matter, ending up with a generic landscape with a point of interest that was far too near the centre of the paper.  And I’ve forgotten how to do trees – I’m back to primary school and drawing a circle on a stick.  This all just reeks of lazy painting.  I’ve just assumed that my transparent primaries (quinacridone magenta, transparent yellow, French ultramarine) will produce something vibrant without any effort on my part.  Well, the news is they don’t.

Other colours on there (not that I care) are burnt sienna, raw sienna and burnt umber.  Plus spatters of titanium white and cadmium red at the end.  And at one point I put in some cadmium yellow in an attempt to brighten things up a bit.  That’s eight colours in total.  Ridiculous.

As for the gesso, it adds a bit of interest with those vertical stripes but it needed a proper painting on it to really test it out.

This one was an unmitigated disaster.  It has been cut up to be used as collage material.

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