Time

For the underpainting, I started with some masking fluid spatters and joined some of them up in tree-like patterns using masking fluid in a mapping pen.  For the colours, I used the half pans in my experimental set, so different colours to normal: Winsor yellow, Winsor orange, permanent rose, permanent alizarin crimson, sap green and olive green.  Plus French ultramarine and burnt sienna from my normal palette.  I spattered on some indigo (opaque so unlikely to spread out of control) and some salt.  Then I put on some netting bags, bubble wrap and scrunched up Easter egg and French stick wrappers and weighed it all down.  I did this yesterday and, with the day being quite hot, it dried in tome for me to reveal the underpainting and think about it overnight.  Here’s the underpainting before the masking fluid was removed:

Having given up on the idea of portraits, I thought I’d just go down the abstract landscape route using acrylic inks (Earth red, indigo and sepia) and granulation medium.  I found that the inks liked to follow the white lines that I’d reserved on the paper.  I also tried out something I’d never done before, sharply blowing the ink through plastic tubes (the ones that come with thin ended paintbrushes are great for this) and ended up with some great looking branches and thorny bits.  But all the good stuff was around the outside and there was an ugly, empty looking space in the middle.

We then go into a long painful process of trying to make something of the middle.  Spattering with opaque watercolours (cadmium red, cadmium yellow, cobalt blue, titanium white) didn’t make things any better.  Nor did joining all the yellow spatters together with yellow lines (why would it?).  Or putting yellow spots in the middle of all the bigger white spatters (ditto).  So I tried putting on acrylic inks in the middle again (including white, gold and waterfall green this time) and applying sharp blows and salt.  It didn’t make things any better.  If anything, it made the ugly area bigger.  Next I tried scraping with a credit card.  By now the paint and ink was thick like oils, so this definitely did something.  Although the middle was now looking really muddy, I did at this point spot some trees and a bit of top to bottom symmetry in the scraped pattern and this gave me the idea of adding a mini landscape in the middle.

Obviously, the mini landscape needed to be created using opaques, so I used cadmium red, cadmium yellow and titanium white.  The white only appeared in the reflections.

The mini-landscape didn’t really fit with the rest of the painting, so I added that cadmium red border around the outside.  This seems to unify things a bit more, with the border both matching some of the mini landscape and having a bit of the background showing through.

Finally I spattered on more cadmium red and cadmium yellow, then stood back.

The painting would have been much better if I’d stopped after the first application of acrylic inks but I’ve still ended up with something interesting, even if it’s not brilliant artwork.  There’s both an explosiveness to the painting and (because of the red) a feeling of danger.  But the guy with the dog is oblivious to it all.  Is something about to happen that will change history?  And not in a good way?  Who knows?  This painting feels like it should be the subject of an M.R.James short story.  Some dog lover buys a painting that’s supposed to make his dreams come true, and it does but everything turns out really badly.  At the end of the story our destitute art collector is on the streets, trying to sell the painting.  Some busker with a guitar comes up and asks how much the painting is selling for.  The seller is about to quote a price and looks at the painting and finds that the dog walker in it has changed into a busker.

Shall I put it up for sale?  No.  This feels cursed.  No good can come to anybody having this one on a wall.