Gesture and Layering

If you want to paint fast and in layers, acrylic is your best medium. One layer of gestural splashes, as in this painting by Keren Vishny, can dry in about ten minutes. This is quite an exciting way to paint. Though it may seem careless and easy, it is neither. Working like this takes a lot of concentration. It’s like doing a dance step with the same expression but allowing slight variations as long as they fit into the expressive range. Theme and variation.
Above is the finished painting. Here on the right, the almost finished painting, where the vertical drips in the middle were felt to be too insistent, too demanding on the eye because they were uninterrupted. (Enlarge and compare to the finished work.)
The painting can fall into the category “Abstract Expressionism” and also in “All-Over Painting.” When working in this “all-over” mode, patters tend to emerge with one element assuming a starring role. As soon as one element stands out, the all-over feeling is destroyed. The artist must always stand back and see the whole.  It’s  not easy to paint this way.
Painting by Keren Vishny, acrylic on canvas, 40”x30”
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Painting in Acrylic

This large painting (30” x 40”) was inspired by a photo of rocks on a sea shore.  You can probably guess that the arrangement of the rocks corresponds roughly to the large ocher area on the left.  After that the paint takes over.  The artist/student, Lorna Grothe,  is finished with representation after that.  The rocks have served their purpose.  Where does all that purple come from?  You can be sure the ocean was not purple in the photo.  The painting has taken over.

The first stage, just purple and ocher, is shown above. Then she added the large white.  Then some more patches of color, black and red, over the purple.  After that she was at a loss over what to do next.  Because acrylic dries fast, we were able to jiggle the imagination by just sticking some scraps of paper on the painting surface.  The next image shows the painting with these patches of color ripped from a magazine.  You can’t do this if you’re working in oil because the oil dries so slowly.  But here we have an advantage of acrylic:  when you’re stuck, just glue some patches onto the surface to help you imagine the work anew.

After all the snippets of paper were removed, her sense of the work was refreshed and Lorna moved into the last stage.  Here’s the final painting, at least for this term.  Work may continue on this painting, but it may also be considered completed.

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

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