some 'in-progress' images of a new painting... the warm, dry weather has helped speed things up...
[6.30pm, wednesday]and, much earlier (or how this painting came into being)...
i had previously primed and subtly textured the surface in a pale grey - i daubed on the violet-brown to approximate a mottled appearance, which i would later cover with some thin white... i changed my mind about the overall scale of the image... i wanted to 'zoom' in more...
some patchy, scrubbed yellowy-grey white, which dried quite unevenly - but that's ok - i didn't want it to be too even - with stains, residues, traces, the pentimenti of the previous layers.
more thin layers (or scrubby glazes) in a violet-grey-brown...with a suitably eroded surface, i allowed a small colony of supersize crustose lichens to find their position quite naturally, based on the uneveness of the surface - there will be more. lichens are actually a fungus which combine with algae (as a nutrient) to grow. i quite liked the look of the painting's surface before the first (dark) additions of lichen-ness, but it was just a surface, the illusion of a stone slab or a weathered wall - aesthetically very pleasing (to my eyes) but i couldn't justify it as a proper painting - perhaps i should have been a set painter.
anyhow, work continues on a second painting (no first stages captured on camera) - this one is much darker, with some khaki green and grey-brown... here's a detail of the surface textures...
as i type, the preliminary circles of lichen are drying on this canvas, and, i hope, to a suitably crusty finish... but there again, i might just have made a fine mess of it...i would like to start a third painting of lichen-encrusted surfaces but i have no more stretchers of this size... and no money to buy any...i have no art-historical reference or precedent for these paintings (other than my own photographs - the found paintings) but i do have the sustaining concept of always looking at things close-up, magnified, a childhood fascination with the world in macro, seeing the biodiversity of life, secret discoveries, detritus, fragments and all that...anyhow, some of the striped paintings, the farmscapes, still need resolving, when i get the time. i have become quite locked into painting stripes and striations of late - i can see the obvious visual influences - but the found paintings, in the colonies of lichens, in their unassuming beauty and naturalness (and perhaps the drawings too) have loosened up my way of working, which is good. i realise that i am quite a good constructor of things. i relish the process and i can see how it will turn out. i feel confident and in control - i know what i want to achieve and why. this is some achievement, in an otherwise quite difficult week...