Cycling quietly through the brick wall

 

I wrote a post recently about my decision to have another attempt at seeing if I could learn to use oil paint in a way that worked for what I'm trying to do. I posted my messy smears as a protest against future frustrations, hoping it would help me to not get precious about whatever happened, and to try to help me to keep going through the disappointments that had ended up against brick walls in previous attempts over the years.

To my surprise, the walls have not really appeared so far, and I feel I'm starting to feel the simple rewards of not giving up. Any of it. Perhaps I needed to do a great deal of experimenting and learning about colour with acrylic first. The acrylic painting taught me that I loved thin paint and layers, and that acrylic could be used in this way. It let me hang on to my inky black line, and eventually it taught me that I didn't want to stay within lines of any kind. It let me learn a way of playing with figuration that was not tonal realism, and it helped me to learn about a process that wanted to be free to be itself, unhindered by my thoughts and desires and intentions.

One of the things that has facilitated what feels like a tiny, quiet leap forward has been the discovery of Seawhite's linen-textured oil painting paper. It's a most beautiful surface, like a fine white linen, but it lets you draw with ink and behaves mainly like paper. 

I was also helped through the maze of 'fat over lean' by a painter friend who explained that all the vague instructions about this online seemed to have been missing one key point; that whatever mix of medium/solvent/oil you use, you can always thin this down further with solvent. Liberation (at least until someone tells me why it's not a good idea to do this...).

The two little paintings above have had the most layers and time. The ones below are in various states of undress.

Exploring different ways of going over the line, and different ways of letting one colour meet another...

Smudgy softness, thin paint and solvent...

The same thin paint, a little less smudgy, some brushstroke edges...

Bolder and denser colour in the first layer, with more defined paint edges (that are going more obviously over the edge of the form...).

Writing this here to keep track of myself.