Museum quality

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when selling prints at Birmingham i was frequently visited by Alan Hunt the famous painter of tigers. I was using fibbonacci series etc to block structure the pics but Alan told me he randomly placed the tigers in his images often right on the edge of the canvas. In his pre US days he was commercialy unsuccessfull so i decided to emulate this by devising a way to place objects at the edge of a canvas and test its sucess.
An eye is very attention grabbing so by taking the cube root of the width of the picture i found i could place the said eye near the canvas edge. I used a similar method to place the lips and tongue and stretch what would be a slice through a brain (not alans) drawing it across the canvas.
My brother in law who had been in the police force got unreasonably freaked out by an accident he attended once and with both these things in mind i created this image. It uses quite a few techniques .. the dark areas are applied by putting paint on the canvas and spreading it lifting and then pressing paper moving it spreads the paint nicely and forms a very uniform surface gradient .. i painted most of the subject of a large oil of a horse called "summer rest" in this way .. it retains the colours in a pointillist way. Any (pre done) undercolours are revealed by scraping back whilst wet with a fine blade giving the wealth of fine lines that radiate out. Some is drawn with wire or tooth brushes or fine fan brushes .. other areas are worked over in layers using varnishes and some are dry brushed. Some effects are made by putting the oil onto a textured surface which is the pressed onto the canvas. The title is the comment my son made when he first saw it
"wow that's museum quality dad "
this struck me as very funny although i suspect it will only ever see the inside of a museum if suspended in formaldehyde or wrapped in cling film .. or has that already been done ??

 

 

 

 

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