paint

Paint rocks.

I didn't paint anything for a while, however yesterday I was listening to some music, and it made me think of drawing circles. So I drew a picture that had nothing to do with circles with the oil pastels that R gave me from my birthday.

Yeah, that was OK, but some of them are nice and soft and blend in, but others are really hard, more like a crayon. Then it was time to get on with it, so I hauled out all the painting gear -

• the two old teatowels that I've always had for cleaning brushes from when I was in Sydney,
• the oil paint tubes
• the miniature palette knives i cut out of an old VideoEzy card
• brushes
• linseed oil and clear oil paint/thinner
• a couple of the painting surfaces that I'd gessoed up about a year ago, made of a cut-up Mac G5 packaging box
• newspaper to cover the table
• my turps jar for cleaning brushes mid-work
• the brush cleaning soaps
• a thin stick

Funny isn't it how there's as much cleaning-up stuff as there is painting stuff? Maybe more cleaning-up stuff. I didn't have any special thing for mixing up the paint, that's all right, I usually mix it straight on the canvas anyway and have a big blob of white paint on the side for extra. Nonetheless I wanted a paint-mixing-thing so I covered another big bit of thick cardboard with a strong clear plastic bag that I had lying around (knew it would come in handy, always good to hang on to a good plastic bag) by taping it securely round the back. Then I stuck the white oil paint on there.

Trouble with that white oil paint is that it's cheap stuff that I got for a coupla bucks from a Newtown 2-dollar shop, so whilst the quality of colour is good, it is extremely sticky and thick. Think Colgate stripe toothpaste, instead of what you really want which is more like good-old fashioned Nivea hand cream, the one that comes in the flat blue tin.

So I stuck the toothpaste on the plastic bag surface and mixed it up with some of that clear oil paint stuff, it's made by Bob Ross brand, I got some of his Linseed oil as well, but that's thick like honey therefore too viscous to use as an extender. I used to always use the paint brush to mix the paint with the extender, but I rekkined that's too harsh on the precious brushes (they cost a lot!) so I use my VideoEzy card tool instead.

Got is all mixed up which was nice, then to painting. I'd seen some TOPS persian calligraphy-graffiti that my mate Stefanie form work put me onto, fuck it's good, like a storm of letteroids billowing across a satisfying big canvas. But I also wanted to do it all in blue. Ages ago, I made a shiny small blue painting that Ben really liked, which had this technique where I made repeating brush movements, just in all in plain prussian blue.
So I put down some stripes of different blues, with a coupla white ones in between, then slobbered on some of that extended white, and got into it with the phat brush. Up down up down up down lalalala. Orrite not bad now what.
Got a much thinner brush, and did the same thing all over again, top to bottom, right to left, but had rotated the canvas 90°. So you could see the phat strokes then the thinner ones.
Finally, I used stick to scratch updownupdown all over it again, again after a 90° turn. Ossome! Coz the paint is mushed around this way, you get gradations of colour but at the same time it's all repeating. Here it is:


Very pleased with myself, I did a yellow and orange one too. You don't get to see a pic of that coz all my shots came out blurry.

Then there was all this lovely bluewhite and orangewhite stuff left on my paint-board, so I did a third painting, that's got dots on it. Here's a handful of shots:



The one above is a close up of the bottom edge. I have no idea where it came from, but I rekkin it looks like a city or forest way off on the horizon.

On the right, you can see the whole thing. Sorry about the terrible lighting for the shot, but you can see the circles floating around there, up in the sky.

Which was how this was all supposed to start anyway.