First Painting Complete!
10.25.2023
I built and stretched four 48 x 36 inch canvases to get me started with this body of work and completed the first painting this week. I am playing around with the combination of areas of watered-down acrylic on unprimed canvas and acrylic and spray paint on primed canvas. This is a technique I experimented with at the end of grad school when I was developing the work for my thesis exhibition. I came back to it for this body of work because it was a way to open up my options for varying the surface quality within the painting. Venice provided such an incredible amount of textures both organic and manmade that I wanted to have the ability to depict it as I saw it. Working this way also allows me to creating varying degrees of space within the work even though the compositions are abstract. The unprimed areas can provide a feeling of distance, an atmospheric quality that is harder to achieve with the slickness of areas with primer. The use of collage for the studies was a great preparatory exercise as well because it allowed me to see the composition in pieces as well as in a whole.
This painting is made up of sections of water, the algae covered stairs down to the canal, architectural elements and my favorite addition… the hot pink area that was actually a bit of typography I saw on a poster in the entrance of a cafe. The palette is made up of local color rather than imagined color to make an even deeper connection to the recorded observations that inspired this work. Right now I am thinking that the title will be 10:28–10:38 am because that is the time frame in which I saw and recorded all of the images used to build the painting.
My work has a huge focus on place but time is almost as important of an element in the process. The things I experience and collect as inspiration may or may not be available in the same way in another time. Even 5 minutes can make a difference in the appearance of the place, object, shadow, light, texture, or color.
Lots more to come as this work continues to develop. Just a reminder, you can support this project by donating to my GoFundMe campaign . I am offering lots of original works of art to those who donate!
