Graph or grid structure
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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