I’ve been re-reading one of my favourite art books, Victoria Finlay’s ‘Colour: Travels Through The Paintbox‘. Most of my books on colour are dry and rather academic but this is a rare book – well researched, informative, intelligent AND beautifully written. She’s a social anthropologist turned journalist with a passion for art and that passion shines through in this book. There’s a bit in it about how what we see when we look at colour are actually vibrations, wavelengths of energy, electrons excited when light falls upon them. I’m absolutely fascinated by this and am trying to represent this in someway in my art. She also spent some time with Australian Aboriginal artists who explained that what we perceive as the real world actually lies ‘like a blanket’ over the reality of existence and this duality is what they are representing in their art.
I’ve been working on this piece for some time. I blogged the initial stages a couple of weeks ago and this week I’ve been overlaying the basic drawing and colour washes with a layer of white oil bar, thinned with a translucent colourless oil bar. Then I’ve removed some of the oil pigment with cotton buds [Q Tips] to create a vibrating mass of patterns across the surface of the figure. When you get up close, you can see through the surface pattern to the underlying ‘reality’. I feel like I’m getting somewhere with this.
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just beautiful mix of colors!
Thank you Jennifer 🙂
Very nice work. Love the colors.
Thanks Hansi, I’m having fun developing this technique
It is beautiful, so much texture and surface interest.
Thank you AnneRose. It keeps me absorbed for hours working over the surface
Oh Rosie I love this. The translucency gives it an ethereal quality.
Thanks you 🙂 It’s interesting developing the technique as I go along, I keep discovering new qualities
Very interesting. I am intrigued by how we see things as a blanket. I love the overlaying colors.
thank you 🙂
How many different types of media do you work in? These pieces are so moving, great work, OMY
Thank you – I just mix things up to get the image I want. This is Bockingford paper prepared with several layers of rabbit skin glue, ovlaid with 3 acrylic colour washes in yellow, red, blue then worked over with a layer of charcoal which I’ve rubbed into before using the oilbars.
Well the resulting piece is something special indeed; what kind of scale do you usually work in? OMY
Around A1-ish – 40 – 60 cms or bigger 🙂
Oh fantastic, the bigger the better I say…well not always haha. Great work though, we’ll be keeping a watchful eye on ya! OMY