Medium and Support
My style of painting is a distillation of various techniques I’ve developed over the years. Experimentation with all sorts of other mediums led me to where I am artistically and this post outlines what I currently use as a visual artist.
A Day In The Life Of A Shark - acrylic on cradled wooden panel - 2022
Medium - Acrylic
The quick drying nature of acrylic paint is both a blessing and a curse; I can safely transport work soon after completion but the medium dries too quickly sometimes. My studio gets very hot in the summer and makes painting virtually impossible beyond around ten in the morning. On especially hot days, acrylic starts drying on the palette before I’ve had a chance to mix my first colour. Specks of dry paint cling together until the mixture is too viscous to be applied to the support. Admittedly the friction generated by mixing paint speeds the drying process up but this is only a problem when the ambient temperature is abnormally high. On days such as this I tend to get to the studio as early in the morning as I can manage and finish before 10am.
Despite this, acrylic works for me. It was the standard paint used by art departments when I was in school and because of that I feel it emphasises the crude, naïve aesthetic I especially like in my painting.
Shapes From The Cave 2 - acrylic on canvas - 2021
A lot of the work is done before anything hits the support. Most of the colours I use are mixed thoroughly until there are no streaks left of the original colours at all. Obviously, depending on the amount of paint I need, this can take a lot of mixing. The addition of varying amounts of Mars Black in every paint mixture mutes each block colour, this affords the finished piece a cohesion otherwise difficult to attain. On a local level within each piece, something about the relationship between two painted block colours adjacent to each other is visually satisfying to me. Less important in the efficacy of this relationship is what the colours are and more how solid and sharp the line between them is. Technically the two colours may even clash but they work together in the context of the painting.
Support - Canvas and Cradled Wooden Panel
I use canvases for larger pieces of work as they’re lighter and thus easier to manoeuvre around on a table than big wooden panels. I keep them horizontal while I work rather than using an easel, partly because ones I’ve used in the past have either been expensive or have quickly fallen to pieces. On one occasion when living and working in Bristol, I bought a new easel only for it to break before getting it back to my studio - it was after this I decided not to use them anymore. My abstract approach makes it easier for me to work horizontally anyway - I am not usually studying a subject directly in front of me. I can see how some artist’s prefer to use an easel, though. Realist portrait or still-life painters need the support to be vertical in order to keep it visually level with their subject matter. The accuracy they are looking to achieve would be virtually impossible if they were continually adjusting their gaze up and back down to their painting.
The Outer Swamp - acrylic on canvas - 2021
For smaller pieces I use deep and boxy cradled wooden panels as support. They give a crude physicality to the work in line with my style of painting. They’re also solid to the touch and smoother than canvas after priming, allowing for greater detail when working on the painting itself. I cover every last millimetre of the front and sides of the support with paint until the panel has truly become the painting, the line between my work and the work of the machine used to construct the panel has disappeared.
