It's late April 2025. Over the (cold) winter months I've been making a series of oil paintings, stepping away from complete abstraction in favour of a hard and strong composition with knife edge curves; bright colours tempered with soft neutrals and a sparing use of light and shade to give depth. Painting in oils is [...]
I've applied the layers of colour and also added highlights and shadows. This is delicate work, oil paint has the consistency of thick butter and as such can be tricky to manipulate. That the paint dries so slowly is both a blessing and curse, the blessing is you can continue moving it around and making [...]
The colours are going on again. Through trial and error I find the most successful method is to apply several thin layers allowing for drying time between layers. You then build up a lovely colour saturation and density. If you apply the paint thickly it looks heavy and takes a LONG time to dry, we [...]
The areas which will be colour have now been blocked out in the white gesso. I've applied around four coats of the gesso to get a pure white. When the colour is applied it will look clean and pure, no marks underneath. I quite like the look of the painting as it is now the [...]
This may seem like an odd step, I've wiped much of the colour away now and have begun to paint these areas white. They will need several coats of white gesso to get back to pure white again. Why.. you may wonder? To get perfectly saturated colours some, especially yellow, needs to be applied on [...]
Playing around with colours looking for the perfect combination. Bright colours are like white chocolate, too much and it becomes overly sweet. You need some neutrals so the brights can be an accent rather than dominating. I'm quite happy with the colour balance so far but further tweaks will be needed.
Adding colour; initially I'm blocking in areas to see how the colours work. These most probably won't be the finished colours. I'm using a thin layer of paint for two reason, firstly so it will dry quicker and secondly it can be easily removed if needs be. This is quite a game, I'll keep making [...]
Pentimento - derived from the Italian 'pentirsi' meaning to change your mind. Pentimento is a change made by the artist during the process of painting. I make many of these changes, painting over lines and scrubbing an area back to the primed canvas. Here I'm feeling happier with the movement in the painting, however I [...]
I'm sketching out the composition with paint and a brush. A few grid lines give me structure and something to work around. The composition will change from this point most probably several times however I need a starting point, a beginning, and this is it.
It's October '24 and I'm looking at a big white rectangle. Artists often grapple with this stage and I'm no exception.. how to begin? I've applied a thin wash of oil colour giving a base. Later on I'm looking to use the colours of summer fruits, blackberries and currents and the base colour reflects these. [...]
