Paul Merson

I started off intending to keep pressing my case for PAOTY but halfway through this one got the rejection email. It will be at least another year before I make it on to the show.

Still, on to the painting itself. I googled for people born on 20 March and found football pundit and former player Paul Merson, 58 years old today. Somehow he’s the first person I’ve ever painted who’s played for Arsenal.

Paul’s had his issues over the years and I found a photo of him looking especially haunted. I decided to paint him in landscape format, leaving a big space behind his left shoulder for all the invisible demons in his life. That was a big decision and a pretty smart one on my part. For the posterised colour scheme, I went for the tundra colours. It had to be tundra or blue because I wanted something cold and serious.

The methodology broadly followed my usual process for posterised paintings with the tundra coloured scheme. Because there was going to be so much dark background, I deliberately took some extra actions to keep things interesting:

• I spattered in some masking fluid stars and, after seeing an interesting runny bogie hanging from my masking fluid brush, masked out some random lines too.
• In none of the three layers did I use a single colour. Each time I started with the usual single colour (tundra pink, blue and violet) but then charged in tundra green and tundra orange, taking care to keep the values in each layer consistent.
• I sprinkled loads of salt over the very last layer

And things turned out pretty well. The likeness is there. The landscape composition works well, giving enough room for the demons. The extra green and orange charged into the washes (the third, violet wash in particular) work really well. If I could turn back the clock, maybe I’d restrict the background making fluid marks to the stars and leave out the linear marks, but that’s being picky. Paul’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.

Happy birthday Merse. Stay well.