This painting has been a big experiment. Throughout the process of painting the piece I was very indecisive on what techniques and methods to use so I tried them all out on the actual canvas i was painting on. The whole thing has been a trail and error, which is the reason why it has taken so long to get to the point where I am now. When I first started painting it I found that the colours were too solid and I didn’t like the outcome as I thought there was something missing within the piece making it not quite as powerful as I wanted it to be. I started to build up colours to make them more intense but it didn’t seem to help it that much. I was also looking at the darker part of the painting which takes up the majority of the piece and found that it was quite boring to look at. Through a group crit that we had one person said it looked as though it had come out of a computer – not really the response I was hoping for but it was true. I showed them a picture of the first painting I did when I started it and they seemed to like the faded colours better. So I decided that I would try to take away some of the dark paint by rubbing white spirit, however because this painting is so large I had to attach it to a wood panel which had wooden planks going across it resulting in the canvas to lift up around those areas (not creating a smooth surface). When fading out the paint you could very easily see this as it would push the paint around it. After this had happened I decided to go back to how it was and paint it over again because of how the planks were moving around the paint.
Another part which I noticed wasn’t working was the blue around the middle part. I had painted it on too thickly and it didn’t look like the electric blue that I wanted nor was it contrasting with the orange. To solve this I started to rub white spirit on that as wall however, it was already too dry and wasn’t coming off which resulted in me having to scrape off the paint to reveal its under-layer. I did like how this came out because it looked as though it was glowing and added texture to it.
The middle of the painting was also a struggle as I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Atf first I had painted the paint too thickly and it as too solid. I wanted to have layers of colours peering through and I just dint get that from it. So again, I went in with white spirit to rub away layers, some parts worked and some didn’t. What didn’t work was the bright yellow stripe in the middle, when I first painted it I just took oil paint straight from the tube and swiped it down the middle. It created a thick bumpy texture, this became a problem when I decided that I didn’t like the thickness. when I was rubbing it away only parts came off and it left holes of oil paint. as a result of this I had to carry on painting layers to fix it. I also tried to fade out the edges so they weren’t so harsh going into the middle.
what I like about this painting is the vibrant colours. However, the piece in general is not my favourite. I still find that the black is boring to look at even with red strokes of paint within it. I think that there is not enough depth, you can’t see the different layers of paint underneath, you only see what’s on top.
Agnes Kindt 