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The Road to Mixed Media June 9, 2024 20:10 2 Comments
About six months ago I decided to go ahead and experiment with using watercolors to make abstract paintings. I knew that they were not traditionally used for abstraction, but it was precisely that fact that attracted me. Watercolors didn't have the baggage that oil painting has (for me) with respect to abstraction. I did a couple of paintings back in December 2023 I was very pleased with (<--this "Lanterns of Hekate", and this --> "Roots").
I really liked how these came out. But it bothered me that they were both monochrome. I've always had problems with color use. I addressed this by using limited palettes. Some were even classical palettes, such as some listed by Tad Spurgeon's fabulous book, "The Living Craft" (which I highly recommend for painters, especially oil painters). A limited palette really helped me, and I researched which pigments were recommended for blending with other pigments, leading to many happy years of paint nerdiness--and better color composition in my paintings. I got to really enjoy, for instance, using "vibrating" colors, even just relying on pairs like blue and yellow (my favorite) to add interest to my paintings without getting lost in a candy box of all colors everywhere.
But the truth was I really liked monochrome, especially black and white. I just wondered if other people liked such paintings. Wouldn't they be considered drab or even deepressing?
Well, not everyone considered them drab or depressing. A customer bought both of these paintings less than a month after I completed them. That encouraged me to go a bit farther with monochrome paintings.
That same month I began a much larger painting than usual that I worked on for a couple of weeks. I had in the past flirted with using automatism in my painting, but this time I went whole hog, using it over the entire painting instead of in patches here and there. I started with some Daniel Smith's Lunar Black, a highly granulating paint, and just slapped it on the paper, not trying to paint anything in particular.
When the paint dried, I began picking out a subject I had only very rarely painted--an interior. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed doing that. I also brought forward a large number of small weird shapes and figures in the paint and ended up with a mostly monochrome painting with a rather dark and spooky atmosphere. The only color I added was yellow, and that was in the form of colored pencil, since I couldn't glaze over the granulated black paint without destroying the granulation. This was the first time I combined colored pencil and watercolor, and although it worked well, I felt a bit weird about it. Would I be looked down upon for this combo? Did using it mean I wasn't a "serious" artist?
I was very happy with the result, but once again I wasn't sure what people would think of it. I got plenty of positive comments on it, but no one purchased it. So I held back on the monochrome stuff.
Then something happened to me. A big part was attending an active shooter training session at my synagogue in February. My synagogue, another right over the border in MA, and the JCC in Providence all experienced bomb threats in which the caller (no, not an immigrant) informed us that since WE were killing Palestinian children, he was going to kill OUR children. They caught this guy, but he wasn't the only one. And he was far from being the only big-mouth Jew-hater in the world, and right here, where I lived.
Something in me changed forever on October 7, and that combined with the various reactions around me, of people I'd considered friends for years, and then the bomb threats and the training session (of which we will have more), made me determine that I had to find a way to deal with the darkness that was pressing in all around me and that was pulling me into despair and fury. I thought maybe monochrome, especially black and white, would be a good way to handle this emotional darkness. Let the poison out, as Fernando Botero said about his 80 paintings of men being tortured at Abu Ghraib by American forces in Iraq.
So I decided to try going with monochrome and see how it panned out. The next painting came a week after the active shooter training session. I called it "Garden Fairy," although it is the complete opposite of the usual New Age bland Tinkerbell. I have never put it up on my site, although maybe I will do it now that I feel much warmer towards it. It functioned as a kind of gate to freer painting. This began with a plan to paint an old woman in a huge sunbonnet, but rage took over as I slapped mars black paint on the paper. The image arose like a demon in a sorcerer's triangle.
I knew right away that this painting was important for me as an artist. It was ugly, but in a powerful way. It represented my own rage at the circumstances me and my people were being subjected to, but it also stood for my protective spirit. I was glad it did not incorporate any political imagery whatsoever--because I have never wanted to be a "political" artist. That is not my gig, even though I enjoy much political art. This painting was definitely monochrome, but it was also an expression of my own raw feelings, which I had basically never incorporated into my art.
I have never been an emotional painter. I have used my art to create places I would feel good about escaping into. When I got depressed, I could not paint.
So this painting of rage was seismic to my art. It united my interest in monochrome and my exploration of Surrealist automatism into an instrument of my emotions. Since then, I have continued to work in this direction and to tap into my subconscious for imagery--to allow the darkness to pour out. IMO, the paintings I have made since this one are some of the best I have ever created. I look forward to creating many more scenes of a dark world--dark, but not without hope.
Aquapasto II August 27, 2021 20:19 3 Comments
Back in early 2018, I wrote a blog post about aquapasto. It's been my most popular blog post. People still come to read it.
I hadn't done much with aquapasto until recently, when I began experimenting with it again.
I first tried adding some to some paint to see if I could get lines to stand up. That didn't work.
I thought maybe I didn't add enough. Thing is that I noticed the more I added, the less brilliance the paint had--because, of course, there was less pigment per inch. It was spread out. What to do? Layers.
So I thought maybe it might be usable as some kind of transparent glaze, and I added much more aquapasto to each glob of paint, so that they were 50/50. I mixed them up with a very small palette knife I use with my watercolors, usually just to mix some tube paint with a bit of water and end up with something creamy. After mixing the paint and aquapasto, I added one spray of water so it wasn't so sticky.
For most of this painting, I used a type of brush I discovered through oil painting. It's usually used for painting grasses in landscapes and is called a grainer. It doesn't work that well for painting grass, but it's really interesting for building up texture. They are pretty cheap, but you could just as easily use an old flat brush in bad condition that's gotten splayed.
I've experimented on and off with using watercolor paint almost straight from the tube to do drybrush work. This is the kind of painting that leaves a thick (for watercolor) layer of paint on the support, rather than the kind of scratchy drybrush you often see used for depicting Western or desert scenes--at least, that's what I associate that type of drybrush with. The kind of drybrush that leaves a thick, brilliant layer that never has the chance to sink into the paper and thus dilute its brilliance by coloring paper fibers below the surface is very rarely done, from my experience. One thing that seems to prevent watercolorists is the expense of the paint. But you really don't need to use that much, in my experience.
Drybrush does allow for glazing if you really careful to have very little water on the brush, use brights instead of rounds (which tend to dig up the lower layer of any kind of paint), and hold the brush at an angle quite close to the surface of the support, so you are basically skimming along. Adding aquapasto to the mix means not only can you do a drybrush glaze more easily, but you can build multiple layers and you can create texture that is unobtainable any other way.
You can see how thick the buildup of paint and aquapasto is here--thick enough to fill the dips in the canvas weave. This has about 7 layers of paint/aquapasto to it. It will seem even more filled when I finish the painting with cold wax, which I have been doing for the past couple of years. This will make it very water-resistant (I have tested it with a kitchen sink sprayer--beads right up). The painting can then be hung not only without glass but without a frame. If you do use cold wax, you might have to call it mixed media if you enter shows. But if you don't use cold wax and only the aquapasto, you are still allowed to call it watercolor, no matter how much texture you achieve with it, because aquapasto is a gel made from water, gum arabic, and some fumed (safe) silica and has been used by watercolorists for more than a century.
When I first tried aquapasto back in 2018 and posted about my experiences on a now mostly defunct art forum, I thught other painters would be glad to hear how you could add texture to watercolor. Not so much. And worse, another poster scolded me for not sticking to "real" watercolor. Why didn't I just use acrylics or something, they asked with a sniff, the implication being that then the "real" watercolorists wouldn't have to deal with misfits such as myself.
Thing is I wanted to paint with watercolor, but I wanted to push the envelope, to see how much it could actually do. And what's more, aquapasto was invented by 19th-century British watercolorists, and you don't get much more "real" watercolorists than them.
So give it a try. Play with it and see what it can do for you. We need more misfits in the art world.