Canvas time…
Jayyysus…I can’t believe it’s been nearly three months since I updated this!!! Big apologies as this is the one thing I always wanted to keep consistent. It’s been a busy couple of months but all in a good way and I often think that when you work for yourself, especially as a creative, you just tend to go hell for leather, that or either Catholic guilt…lol…
Anyways, I digress as I am bringing you on my Uisce Salach journey so I will continue… After completing the monoprints (see above), I knew then that I was ready to tackle canvas. Saying that, I hadn’t painted on canvas in years so the fear was real lads!!! What I did know was that I didn’t want to paint onto white canvas and by chance I had discovered some old paintings from my degree show that had slightly got damaged and back then I always painted the reverse from what we were taught so I knew I wanted to revert back to that- to paint on a completely dark canvas. That’s also what the monoprints were telling me- that the brighter, lighter more translucent colours sat so well and stood out when put on a darker, more sombre background!
BUT then, I found I had some used linen canvas boards (waste not want not and all that jazz…) and also what better way to put off actually ‘painting’ on canvas so I decided to experiment with them first!!! I knew I wanted a really deep but intense background and that is when I leaned on my older works and remembered that I had added linseed oil to give it a great shine and depth (a killer to dry though!!!)This gave me a great start to working on the deep edge canvas pieces and how I wanted to formulate shape and design within the pieces. I must admit these were hardest pieces of the whole project!!!
You can see the deep shine of the linseed oil in the background (in the first image above) and then it all went a little bit crazzzzyyyy…
Starting to add in, scrape back, expose bits, cover bits…
I am still not sure if I am 100% happy with these pieces but if anything, they were the starting point for the work to come- they made the microscope come alive and that was the main aim.
These pieces also led onto two other deep edge canvases (30cm x 40cm) which I felt a lot happier about but came out so differently. I wanted the work to be not as busy as the pices above and scaled them back a bit. I was still using the monoprints as reference and felt a lot happier with these two pieces. I also became quite caught up in design and realy felt the need to decorate the edges of the canvas. When I looked under the microscope, because it was river water samples, everything was moving, always busy and always in a state of flux and somewhere in my mind, I felt that the canvases had to be as well…
