BLURT

Oops, I completely forgot in my last post to upload the picture of the drawing upon which the painting is based. Here it is next to the painting which is based on the other drawing on the paper:


As you can see, it's very important for a serious artist to buy and use very expensive Visual Diaries made from high quality bleached paper and bound together in a hard-wearing cover of some description, as purveyed by your local purveyor of Expensive Art Products for Serious Artists... wait, no, that's not right at all. As you can see, you can make do with the back of a fucking phone bill. Sorry that you can't hardly see anything, though.

On the left is another little work I have been chipping away at in the background. It's named "Blurt".

New strategies for old problems

What a bloody brilliant weekend! Managed to get out yesterday for several hours of boozing in the sun with S. but aside from that, I worked on the new painting quite a bit. Really enjoying how it's coming along:


No title yet.

ps. The new strategy for the old problem? I've discovered that (fingers crossed knock on wood) Isopropyl Alcohol, in addition to its many uses from cleaning tape recorder mechanisms and LPs, to manufacturing cannabis oil (*cough* or so I've heard), it's marvelous at getting oil paint out of clothes and carpet. Seems to just break the stuff right down and destroy it. I gotta try cleaning a brush with it to see what happens.

PARTIALLY RETICULATED

One of the (two) canvases I didn't include in the pic in the previous post was something I started last year and then had to suddenly stop again in order to move house:



I decided that this was going to be the canvas that I worked on first, so as to gently ease myself back into painting again. After a day or so and some thinking and plotting, it turned into something like this:

And so it goes...

I had spent a few days stretching canvases on a number of stretchers that I had scattered around the place. This included ripping the canvas off a couple of shit paintings from last year, and also stretching over and gluing canvas to some wooden boards that also used to be (shit) paintings, from a looooong time ago.

I hate painting on board for some reason.

Anyhow, I just spent all weekend gessoing and prepping the canvases:


One, two, three layers of gesso on the face, two on the sides, and two sealing the back. On top of that, two layers of thin(nish) yellow (Cadmium Yellow Light) acrylic.

I now have 15 supports of various sizes. The largest must be a good 800mm square. Some of them already have random underpainting on them.

In the beginning

In the beginning was the Modern Cat. And so it was that the Modern Cat made her countenance shine upon me, and she said:


So it came to pass that I unpacked my box of paints, my brushes, my palette knives, my gesso, my gun stapler, my drop sheets, and all my other accoutrements, and cast from mine mind all psychological remnants of the vile behemoth whom had taken away all mine confidence last year... and I got busy.