I did this one on Aquabord back in early September. Aquabord is a kind of hard, plaster surface that you can paint directly on with watercolors. It's not on paper, so there's no prep or stretching required. Once you're finished, if you want to protect it you just seal it with a varnish and you can hang it. Some come pre-attached to a mounting frame as well. What's cool is that you can also just put the whole thing under running water, rub it a bit, and it all washes away. Cool! But a bit scary....
It's had to work this kind of surface aggressively, as the paint will eventually come up. Instead, I really just dove in and did my layering smoothly and quickly. This works very well on surface, and it doesn't muddy up at all. In the end, a very different experience than paper, but fun! I loved that prep wasn't required at all. That really got me painting.
Of course, it costs much more than normal paper does, but I've got to prep so much with the normal paper that I don't paint as much as I'd like. With this stuff, it may cost a bit more, but it seems like I might actually paint a bit more because of the lack of prep required.
I suspect the hard surface you've chosen here has given you greater freedoms ... "Wet Red Poppies" is painted loosely, a hallmark of your style, but now there is an exciting underlying visual tension, maybe almost a nervous quality, in the brushwork ....
ReplyDeleteI'm assuming the board was set down flat (not worked upright), and as the water and pigment were brushed across the non-absorbent surface, each stroke expanded into its own space, and to a certain degree was set free from the constraints of the artist's hand ... The overall effect is that the movement appears more "natural" and beyond fully conscious control ... There doesn't seem to have been any attempt to block or dampen the watery paint once a stroke had been laid down, so the contours remain, although in places it does look like some paint was lifted up by tissue, notably at the bottom of the painting, in the watery blue area -- which, by the way, is the hardest (for me) to read, because it isn't an obvious ground for the forms above it ...
The highest degree of control could be said to be in the paint spatter droplets ... They seem to be willfully directed as they are applied, and because they have more body, intentionality is preserved ... The brush is not allowed to come in contact with the surface, so some of the brushwork is non-brushwork, a good zen principle ...
The overall effect of line and color and movement is something like watching a raindrop run down a window and trying to predict its path (I've actually spent a lot of time doing this, hehe) ...
Then there are the transparencies, a dimension that has been exploited here with much success, and which no doubt is a direct function of applying runny paint to an almost glassy surface that must to some extent contribute to the prismatic effects we're seeing ... The transparencies produce unexpected and stimulating optical greys, an emerging property of the delicately colored petals and leaves ... Here is where the painting clearly says "watercolor" and not "print" ... Borders are suffused with more meaning because blurred ...
I wonder whether this painting was a kind of experiment towards the mural work -- the choice of hard surface and water-based media might suggest that it was -- and if so, if insights were gained ...