So, I thought the issue with gesture was going to be kept on the back burner for a while, but here it is again, cropping up of its own accord, just a few days later, forcing me to deal with it.
There was an old swimmer photo, so old and so bad that I can't even tell if it is Jackson or Harris, but I have been keeping it on my desktop, fiddling with it, opening it up and staring at it from time to time, so I finally just attacked a canvas. It seemed so detached from the Veronicas, that at first I just sketched it on the plastic wrapper of the canvas, without even bothering to unwrap, so sure was I that I would get over it once I saw the composition, but still I liked it. I laid a ground, a sort of pinkish gesso, applied with a spatula (another unfamiliar process) and I let it dry. Then I redrew the outline with conte pencils, just a few lines.
I picked up my biggest fattest brush (which I never do), mixed three shades of blue/turquoise/black/white in a plastic plate (another anomaly) and started laying big fat drippy stripes of paint on the surface. The interesting thing about when I work like this is that I will either end up loving or hating the result...it's never just sort of ok. I blocked in the boy, the tiles, the big splash and all those big fat sloppy blues...clearly I still have plenty to do, but I am liking the ease of this.
There was an old swimmer photo, so old and so bad that I can't even tell if it is Jackson or Harris, but I have been keeping it on my desktop, fiddling with it, opening it up and staring at it from time to time, so I finally just attacked a canvas. It seemed so detached from the Veronicas, that at first I just sketched it on the plastic wrapper of the canvas, without even bothering to unwrap, so sure was I that I would get over it once I saw the composition, but still I liked it. I laid a ground, a sort of pinkish gesso, applied with a spatula (another unfamiliar process) and I let it dry. Then I redrew the outline with conte pencils, just a few lines.
I picked up my biggest fattest brush (which I never do), mixed three shades of blue/turquoise/black/white in a plastic plate (another anomaly) and started laying big fat drippy stripes of paint on the surface. The interesting thing about when I work like this is that I will either end up loving or hating the result...it's never just sort of ok. I blocked in the boy, the tiles, the big splash and all those big fat sloppy blues...clearly I still have plenty to do, but I am liking the ease of this.
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