Sometimes it can take years for a piece to feel finished. Some times you have to simply look at it for a long time before being convinced it’s done. Sometimes however, the answer to solving the issues with an artwork comes to you after a long time pondering it, or after allowing it to be forgotten completely. In the case of this piece, the solution came after the techniques and stylistic approach finally caught up with what the work should have been in the first place. During the summer of 2019 in Brussels, I worked heavily onto this canvas. Firstly an underpainting of bright yellows and turquoise blues was applied in Acrylic. I then added a layer of torn newspaper which was heavily glued and primed. Subsequent layers of Acrylic and pastel were added systematically in between layers of matt varnish. The newspaper warping and wrinkling was sought after to produce a vibrating feel to the piece. This was exaggerated with horizontal lines of pastel. Finally areas of the surface were hacked away using sculptors tools to reveal small hints of the vibrant underpainting.
Although I liked the work, it felt somehow immature and unfinished. This can be very frustrating and can lead to questions such as “maybe if I framed the work it would feel right” and “perhaps it needs more layers etc. etc.” In this instance I decided to leave it alone – transporting it with my other work back to Scotland when my wife and I moved at the end of the year.
May 2020, we’ve been under lockdown for 2 months and Ive been producing oil pastel pieces in a larger format than I would normally. After priming up some canvasses, planning to work on them in this style with oil paint I realised I was missing some vital materials so started pottering around in the canvas storage instead. I then came upon the piece I had forgotten about and realised it was exactly in line with the motifs and ideas I had been thinking about. This vibrating feel was now again relevant and I had the correct method of applying paint to finish the job.
The piece would act as a rough textured underpainting – with the vertical columns providing the scaffolding for the new work.
The final layer of the painting was created by applying thick undiluted strokes of Acrylic with a single palette knife. A mixture of primaries and various strengths of grey and pastel blue-grey were chosen alongside mars black to give weight to the ascending composition of cell like abstract forms. The under-texture is really useful when adding paint using knives as the uneven surface provides resistance and therefore variation in opacity, texture and coverage. Strokes of yellow ochre were added to the primary yellow to ground it. Likewise dark grey was added in points to give a subtle lift and more energy and 3d feel to the blacks.
So a piece is created which really is a sort of complete destruction visually of its original state but conceptually it has finally realised itself. The thin lines of black and red which provided this notion of vibration and resonance evolved to become thick bars of colour which dictate the overall structure and paint application of the piece. The dynamism in the work becomes ubiquitous with how it is made up as a whole, rather than an uneasy element within it.
Keep those strange pieces in the cupboard. Sometimes you’ll lose patience and wipe them out completely when you’ve run out of canvas, but sometimes you’ll find just the right framework for your current ideas to come to life.