Obliterated painting with moss/mold colored stain.

I’ve been working on some paintings in acrylic using a coloured ground rather than working on white. This has been to make my choice of colours more surprising but presented a few problems as my habitual making colour palette doesn’t necessarily work with the colour in the background. Collating photos to extract colour palettes has help me to overcome this problem but it’s only for the physical making a large-scale that allows me to see whether these pieces work or not. I’ve also been going through the process of remaking works. It is more time efficient to work out ideas on a smaller scale, but I discovered before that this isn’t particularly helpful when translating marks and lines onto a bigger surface. The process of remaking is quite bizarre as I have a memory of making the lines as I redraw the same figures in different settings. It is easy to judge the second version as not as good as the original, however this process has been useful and has led me to free up my mark making, through using larger brushes and different scraping tools. I have also reused some canvases, re stretching or obliterating what was there in order to make a new piece. In some cases this leaves a trace of the older work.

Remaking painting with different colour palette. – the figure on the left is tricky as the amount of fabric around the body makes her appear wrongly proportioned.  Introduced some dark redish brown to add weight.

Think the simplicity of this really works. Used my scraping tool to add white to break up the dense purple.

Studio Portrait: Colour change and more linear style more apparent whrn looking at the whole body of work.

Reflection

I have not settled into making work like this and need to be brave with every decision. I am persevering with the acrylic although I miss the smell of oil in my studio,  it is allowing me to create work more rapidly and in a sense more spontaneously.  However, there are some issues with acrylic in that each mark needs to be surer and more confident as it it is less easy to remove. I have to obliterate marks which tends to create an overworked appearance. This could be a hinderance, or if I flip it round a positive to force me to be more assertive in my making. .