The Insanity Of Jones

So after yesterday’s painting, I squirted loads of gesso onto my final page and spread it out.  I got a bit of texture onto it by pitty pattying it with a palette knife, scraping a few lines and putting five finger marks on it.  I then sprinkled on a diagonal line of salt, starting in the bottom right and splitting into two to head off the left and the top of the page.  I then left it to dry overnight.

I didn’t start off with much of a plan today.  I just wanted to use as many colours as possible from my 24 WN halfpans and to make the painting abstract and include lots of clashing complementary colours.  Colour-wise I did end up using 23 of the colours in the set (a set in which I’d replaced the aureolin with transparent yellow).  Chinese white was the colour I didn’t use – what’s the point of a transparent white?  This may be the first time I’ve used the raw umber – I wasn’t particularly impressed with a colour that was too similar to raw sienna and yellow ochre.  I found lemon yellow to be pig ugly too and dabbed out most of it and painted it over.

The other part of the plan was to let the paper texture dictate as much as possible of what was to happen.  So I started by spotting a flat area in the top left, which I wanted to paint in indigo and Winsor orange – two great clashing complements.  Then I decided to paint the salt trails in permanent alizarin crimson, dropping in the odd yellow and blue for a bit of variation.

After that, it was all a blur.  I thought that with some greens, browns and blues to showcase, I should put the blues at the top and the greens and browns at the bottom, like in a landscape.  And I did add some colours to the browns to get what could be some interesting looking rocks if this were a landscape.  And this was the point at which the painting’s subject moved into that blurry area between abstract and landscape.  It was still an abstract but I started thinking of certain bits of the painting as land, sky and the satellite.  And there’s the blue area on the left that could be land or sky, and that diagonal red line that could be absolutely anything.

The sky was looking a bit too dark to be a landscape, so I found myself wetting it with a spray bottle and wiping paint off with kitchen roll.  Then I repainted and washed it a couple of more times and saw something weird starting to happen.  The raised bits of gesso in the pink bit of sky were now looking blue, as if the blue sky were trying to creep into the pink.  There were also raised blue lines in the clouds and some white looking lines in the blue sky.  It all looked so good that I added that same Winsor blue (green shade) in some places in the rocks and grass and to the raised salty bits in the red gash to have it invade other areas.

Finally, I went over the satellite again, leaving a hard edge down its left hand side.  And then I left it to dry while I searched for a good name on my crib list of Algernon Blackwood short stories.

And so I ended up with The Insanity Of Jones.  I have no idea what it’s supposed to be but that’s half the point.  And I don’t know what the other half of the point is.  Complement-wise, there’s the indigo and orange in the satellite and further down, there’s the red vs green and red vs brown.  Not as many battles of complements as I was planning but, then again, I was planning on this painting having lots of separate stories to tell rather than one single story.  The best bits about this one are the textures in the sky and in the greens and browns.  And I keep looking at this and seeing new things.  I’m now wondering whether they’re submarines floating around in the blue sky.  But it’s not what I’d call a pleasure for the eyes, which is why it’s not up for sale.