After a bit of a break to attend to other things, I have photographed another painting that I finished 10 days or so ago. As with the others, it is based on photos of Patea Freezing Works. This one is a bit different. I was unsure about it, so was letting it sit for a while. People who have seen it have been really positive so I think I’m calling it done. It is 16×16″ acrylic on gallery wrap canvas and is for sale on my Etsy.
The demolition of the works is progressing quickly; most of the major structures above ground are no more. Except for the chimney, whose fate has yet to be decided…
Although I finished this one last weekend, I haven’t had time to blog about it. So here, we are, back to Saturday – I’m up nice and early and into it. The photo this is based on was taken some distance from the site by Phu Tran. One of the reasons I like this shot is the strong lines of the chimney and power poles through the centre of the scene. As I keep painting the freezing works over and over again I can feel what I am painting, the how I am painting it, is becoming more focused. The color palette remains the same, even how I apply the paint has stayed the same, but the lines and final marks are becoming much more of a focus for me. Some of the earliest works now feel a little ‘soft’ to me and may yet get some tweaking.
It is the middle of summer here; hot and muggy most days. I am not using my art room at the moment because it is far too hot out there; the walls are iron and there’s no ceiling, just the roof, so nothing to deflect the heat. I use our third bedroom as an office for the newspaper we publish. I have commandeered the desk for painting. I have a table-top easel, a roll of paper towels, old wash clothes, a small box of paints, a jar of brushes and a giant bucket of water. Oh, and my color theory notebook with all my color experiments in it and a pile of canvas – I’m about to move from 16×16″ to 20×20″.
So, this one is 16×16″ acrylic on canvas, and is for sale on here on Etsy.
I showed details from this painting a few posts back when I was talking about the colors I am using. Those photos also give some idea of the mark making involved in these pieces. I start most of the works with a few lines in a black Cretacolor pastel pencil – both as a rough guide to placement and just to get some marks onto the canvas so it’s not so ‘new’ any more. From there I put really runny white acrylic over most areas and start brushing thin acrylic color into the white. Again, just tinting the surface and giving me clues about what goes where. In some areas I will keep working away at it until I have a fairly flat area of final color. While this is happening others areas are drying as quite pale washes.
Once I have paint over the whole canvas, and some areas at a near final colour, I start blocking in larger areas of more concentrated colour. I use big brushes, a lovely wide 1 1/5″Color Scraper, painting knife and old credit cards. As I get more color on I start adding marks using the knife, the edge of the credit cards, brush handles etc. I also scratch paint off again with the same tools. With some of the flatter areas I may mist them with water and then blot some of the paint off with a paper towel. I keep an old houseplant watering bottle on my desk for doing this. The Atelier Interactive paints are especially receptive to this sort of treatment.
Most of the finishing of the work is done without using a brush, except for a rigger, because I like the marks to show.For me it is important that people can see my hand in the work. I think over time we each develop marks that are distinctly our own; even if someone else tried to copy them, they’d never be quite the same. It’s like giving an authentic signature and a forgery to a hand-writing expert; the differences show.
So, this work is titled Framework, and as with the others in the series so far it is 16×16″ in acrylics on gallery wrap canvas.
This is another work which I completed at the weekend, called “Switched Off”. It stared with a photograph of a power switch on a factory wall, with the coloured wires going up he wall towards the ceiling. I don’t know what room it was in within the works. All the other works I have done so far have focused on the exterior of the works, but I have some incredible photos of the interior, including gears, switches and chains. Later, as the demolition continues, there will other things come on site, such as air quality monitoring kits and ground testing equipment. All fascinating stuff in its own way.
Switched Off
Speaking of fascinating. I am reading a book called ‘100 most important science ideas’. I love science; things like Fibonacci’s Numbers, the Golden Rectangle and Schrodinger’s cat. Sadly, although fascinated, my brain is not very good at science. I have a dear friend who is incredibly logical. If you gave us both 30 bits of related information, all on separate bits of paper we would handle it quite differently. She would arrange them all, mentally sort and sift and calculate – then come up with the correct answer. I would look at them all, handle them and scribble on them, perhaps fold some – then go quiet on you. Two hours later my brain makes a leap of intuition and I yell out the correct answer, frightening small children and animals in the process. (no wonder my husband sometimes panics when I do crosswords) So, I am destined to enjoy, but constantly fail at, science – ah well…
Anyway, back to art, which is much more suited to my slightly unusual brain. As with the other Freezing Works paintings, this one is 16×16″ in acrylic on canvas and will be for sale through my website. I may not get it uploaded tonight as I seem to be having problems with our wireless connection.
In my last post I talked about how I selected the colours for this series – a combination of the local light, the colours of our land and probably most importantly the colours that describe how I feel about the Freezing Works.
I don’t normally work in such a high key palette but in working through Confident Colour, Nita Leland’s book, I realised that on many ways I prefer high key even though I tend to paint quite dark. I made a conscious decision to lighten up. It has been a tiring week and work, then this morning I got up and did 3 loads of washing and ironed 5 ambulance shirts, made our lunches, loaded the dishwasher etc then headed for my art room.
Remember I said that the colours I am using are partly an expression of how I feel in my memory about the freezing works? Turns out they are also a reflection of who I am feeling at the time, which is no great surprise I guess. How do I know this. Because I painted for a couple of hours then roamed off to get a cold drink. When I came back to my art room – oh my goodness!
This afternoon’s effort is dark and gloomy, despite using the same few tubes of colour as before. It is my use of them that has changed. Grey sky, gloomy buildings, dark shadowed land. Dreadful…so tomorrow it gets gessoed over and I start again.
I did the only sensible thing I could do when I realised what I had done. I went into Mum’s room, where she was doing a crossword as always, and got into her bed for a nap in the sun (giving her strict instructions to wake me after 30 minutes). It’s amazing what a quick nap can do for your day. It’s funny, at the weekend I often have a wee nap on or in her bed while she reads or does the crosswords. Some of us never get over needing our Mum no matter how old we are…
In the meantime, here is one I finished a couple of days ago now. It’s 16×16″ in acrylic on canvas and called Bare Bones IX. It’s for sale on my website here.
Cath Sheard Art 