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. [...]
It's October '24. Over the summer months I've painted a series of geometric oil paintings. This is number seven and here I'll show my process from blank white canvas to finished painting. I'm using canvas stretched boards which are ready primed. The solidity of the boards is the huge advantage to a canvas stretched on [...]
Months of work and countless decisions have now culminated in this conclusion. I went with my initial idea, to paint the thick red band across the centre of the two paintings. The red is an ink, a beautiful rich red I love, and this effect couldn't have been achieved using paint. A lot of fiddling [...]
We are now in early April 2021 and I've been through the difficult phase often encountered at this point, deciding how to proceed both aesthetically and technically. I now know what I want to achieve, although this can and usually does change. In the process of putting my background together I've accidentally made the paintings [...]
I’ve stretched the canvas', primed with rabbit skin glue and applied 3 coats of gesso. I'm at the 'big white canvas' stage, a stage artists generally don't enjoy, large blank blocks waiting to be transformed. To knock back the white I'll now apply a base layer, a darker neutral coloured oil paint thinned with turps.
I've stretched the canvas and primed the linen with rabbit skin glue so now the first layer of gesso goes on. Gesso is a white paint mixture consisting of a binder mixed with chalk, gypsum, pigment, or any combination of these. It's an undercoat essentially with a matt and slightly rough surface which the paint [...]
Early 2021 and I'm making a pair of large, long and thin, works on canvas. I bought the stretchers - the wooden frames -which I've assembled then stretched with best quality artists grade fine linen. Next prime the canvas first with rabbit skin glue; this acts as a sealant before gesso's applied and tightens the [...]
What a difference 5 years have made. From bare bones to working and messy art studio.
