Somewhere

Well this is something new.  I’m writing up a painting before I’ve taken a photo because it’s being left to dry overnight and seems to still be developing.

Let’s start at the beginning.  A few weeks ago, a very talented local artist, Roger Milton, former landlord of the Rose and Crown, was having a bit of a clearout of his studio and invited me over to see whether I could provide a loving home to a y thing he might otherwise have thrown away.  One of the things I came away with was a set of Pebeo Vitrail paints.  They’re apparently for painting on glass and can produce stained glass effects.  I thought that sounded interesting and I do have a glass fridge shelf and three Perspex panels that I’m planning to paint on at some point.

The plan for tonight was to experiment a bit.  I took the mankiest of one of my three Perspex panels and marked up some squares on it for experiments.  I wanted to see whether watercolour ground and crackle paste could work on the perspex and how the  Schmincke supergranulators worked on those two surfaces.  And I wanted to see how the Vitrail paints worked on watercolour ground, crackle paste, sanded Perspex and bare Perspex.

The first thing I found was that my crackle paste had all dried up and that I couldn’t get it back to its former state by adding water and shaking or heating it.  I need to invest in a new tub at some point as I d9 plan on using cracks paste again at some point.

And then there was the Vitrail paint.  What can I say?  This stuff is evil.  DO NOT BUY IT!  I was careful to use only a cheap brush but the paint destroyed it.  It became unuseable.  They recommend using pipettes with this paint too, but it also wrote off a pipette.  Once I’d used one colour in it, I couldn’t clean it and that first colour contaminated all the others.  I thought I’d lost one of my two pop up water pots too, but I managed to save it with white spirit.  And I had to use white spirit to get the paint off my hands.  Even then, my fingers still felt sticky the rest of the evening.

At first I threw the paints in the bin, but I then had second thoughts.  Why not send them on their way with a bang by pouring them on a sheet of perspex, letting them run together and creating an abstract?  So this is what I did.  Out on the lawn, obviously – there was no way I was letting those paints back in the studio.  Even then, I put an old plastic tablecloth underneath the perspex.  And the devil paint soaked through it in places.

So, enough about the paint and on to the painting.  I started by pouring paint on randomly, hoping that it would run around.  I should probably have tipped up the perspex at this point but didn’t, instead using the written off brush to try to encourage some mixing.  That didn’t really work,  only producing mud.  So then I tried tipping the perspex around and that’s when the paint started running and producing interesting patterns.  I added more of the white, hold and yellow paints in an attempt to brighten things up.  I wasn’t going to add colours like brown and black as things were already muddy enough.  With all this tipping adding of paint, it was a bit of a rollercoaster ride: things would get more interesting then more boring, them more interesting again, then more boring.  You get it, yeah? And then I cracked and decided I wanted something vaguely realistic in there amidst the abstract, so marked in a tree and some branches wit6 the brush.

I was creating a huge puddle of paint on the tablecloth by now and wondering whether the painting would ever dry.  And, more importantly, where it could dry.  It couldn’t stay in the garden where the dog could brush past it and get dirty and there was no way it was coming indoors or in the studio.  Could I put it on a shed or garage roof?  Maybe but I really didn’t trust that paint not to run all over the place and leave me to wake up to the sight of the whole garden being this horrible muddy colour.  So I went for the option available.  I left the painting to dry overnight in one of the wheelie bins.  Not the recycling or garden waste bin, the other one.

The paint was still running, so who knows whether there will still be a tree in the painting tomorrow morning?  I have no idea what to expect.

………

Ok, it’s the next day.  The painting still hadn’t dried but after going over it with a hair dryer and leaving it in the sun (inside a large cardboard box) it’s pretty well there now.  I’m leaving it outside on a table for now.

And what I’ve ended up with is, well, pretty ugly really.  Too much of the paint has turned dark and muddy and the tree is badly drawn.  There are a few interesting spots with stained glass effects and I think this one would look best just stuck onto a window where the light could shine through it at times.  But, no, it’s ugly.  This one won’t be going in the shop window and is actually going straight to the bin as it smells of paint and that’s not a smell I want in the studio.  The painting still needs a name though, so I picked out a Jimi Hendrix track; it looks as if my online list of Algernon Blackwood short stories may have disappeared, leaving me with the Hendrix list to consult for painting names.

After using one perspex sheet on this painting and one for experimentation, I’m left with one Perspex sheet and one glass fridge shelf.  And with two oil pastel eye paintings already waiting, I’ll be taping an eye to the back of both of them and painting the front in watercolour, leaving a hole for the eye to peep through.  I have plans.