Dear readers,
Today I have been working on one of the new big paintings. Yesterday I thought that I would now stay in a ‘little paintings-mood’, but no, tomorrow I felt like going on on one of the bigger ones.
I was wondering if I should not finish one of the others two, but then I remembered what Nicholas Wilton, and also other artists said: that it is perfectly okay to work on different canvases at the same time: after a while you look at it with a fresh perspective. You can rotate so everytime the painting looks ‘new’ again.
When he has a show, and he wants to make 12 paintings for that, he starts with 12, and let them develop together, so that they make a coherent whole at the time of the show.
Well: I don’t have that much space here, but I like the idea.
Today I started with crayon (I always use a hairdryer when I apply it, the neocolor II comes out much more smooth on the canvas – on paper you can ‘press’ but on canvas that does not work), and I also used colours with a lot of pigment. Usually I don’t do that because you hardly can paint over it (it smears very much). Now I also used dark red, dark brown, dark blue, and I covered it with fixative which is normally used for fixating soft pastels. That worked quite well! (Except my workspace is filled with stuff that probably is very bad for your lungs and brain).
Then I went further, purely intuitively more green and blue started to come to the foreground.
Okay: let’s wait for the next step!
Thanks for reading this all!
Simone
ps: I post two photo’s: one with the crayon, and one with the greens and blues.
Hi Dotty!
I am not so sure if I am a model for that ‘listening’ mode ;-) …. enough noise here too (at least at times…). But still: thanks!
About the hairdryer: it works both ways. The canvas gets warmer, but the most important thing is that the crayon gets warmer, so it gets more thick and smooth on the canvas. The drawback is that sometimes some crayons with certain pigments get so smooth that they almost crumble. White, black and dark red for instance you can almost ‘bend’ in your fingers. It becomes almost too moist, and that does not work too well, since you have then to fixate all the pigments. (Hope I am clear).
And about the pencil: I use it everywhere: on top, on the underlayer. And have no problem with that (except maybe that it smears a little). What do you experience with crayon?
bye!
I never tire of hearing about your process. I am always so curious about each step, and about the inner conversation, the choices the intuition makes and presents to your eyes (and mine). So rich. So captivating.
I am being mindful about all the noise in my head recently. I am setting and resetting the intention to slow down and be still. To listen to what bubbles up from deep inside, even if it is the merest whisper. Thank you for living that listening as a model for me.
When you use your hairdryer in conjunction with your neocolors, do you heat the canvas and then draw? Another question: You use pencil early on with these under-layers, yes? After you have crayon on the canvas, do you use pencil again or not? My experience is that pencil doesn’t work effectively after applying crayon, or after using fixative.