Recycled Drawings

There are so many drawings lying around the studio from art school days. Some are sentimental or personal. Others just demonstrate the learning curve. All these drawings are on lovely paper. The solution to my storage problems is recycling. 

These life drawings are receiving the random, abstract, 'let's see where this goes' attitude.

Colour MakesMe Happy - Back to this old thing...

It's been over two years since my daughter was born. The last time I worked on this piece she was still in my belly. 

I've been battling a loyalty of sorts to the original painting and a new palette. Regardless of the ultimate outcome, the mere moments I get to spend in the studio are joyous and I find myself eagerly awaiting them.

I'm also recycling very average life drawings from my early uni days... See the post on Recycled Drawings

The original pre destruction

Day 1 - Post destruction

Day 1- New Tangents

Day 2 - new palette dominates

Day 2 - hopeful resurrection of original with only iPhone to use as reference material

Day 3 - reference material on the wall and the battle between old and new begins with a dash of chance and impatience thrown in

Mistakes are just a chance to learn something new

I took a photo with Instagram and added a filter, I love how it looks with the amber glow. This feels like its getting close to its final state

I started to apply warm tones to areas of the white wash. I was working the middle white space and it just kept moving around. I found other areas doing the same thing. Something was wrong. I thought about why and realized that I have used a bunch of different materials and haven't thought about them working in harmony.

I primed with Gesso and sanded and repeated three times. The surface was so beautiful and smooth. I started with melted oil pastels. I used turps to move it around and create areas of transparent colour. I used more oil pastels and painted in some acrylic with gel medium and some mixed with varnish medium (for acrylic) .

Layering over this and that, scraping back, varnishing sections and smudging oil pastel with turps with no apparent plan or consideration of material compatibility has caused the whole thing to be unstable. Bits and pieces chipped off, peeled off and just didn't work.  I started to feel like this painting is a metaphorical self-portrait.

Being a Virgo, I couldn't stand it and I made the drastic decision to start again. I began to scrape back all of the layers...

 

 

I'm glad all of this has happened. I like cropping the painting with photos, it focuses on details and I often think of making a series of large paintings from the photos - almost like a physical, historical remnant of itself, a visual history of the paintings past lives.

The other amazing thing is that I am committing to know my materials so that I can use them all together. I'm going to have to start recording the process in a journal... yay :)