Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Stained Glass - A Work in Progress

Today I paint a half day with the Buckhorn Tuesday Painting Group. I gathered together a number of paintings that are in various stages of completion and took them with me to do some work on and hopefully finish at least one.

Every so often I will work on an abstract, usually I work with Oriental papers and make collages (see posting on 26 Mar 2010 for Enchantment), other times I will just throw paint onto the paper and add salt, or apply cheese cloth, leaves, plastic wrap and let the paint dry and wait and see what I end up with. (See postings on 18 and 19 Feb 2010 for Underwater Playground and Coral Reef.) Then I add what I feel is necessary to complete the painting.

I had started this painting in a workshop with Sterling Edwards a number of years ago. As a base for the painting I used a photograph I had taken of a trellis and blocked out the areas of strong contrasting lights and darks with very little detail.

Using an assortment of colours to the areas that I had marked out, I worked at keeping the painting fairly bright and open without a lot of tight detail.

The large blocks of colour reminded me of stained glass. With the parts of the trellis still left unpainted I decided that it looked vaguely like a cross and masked the area out to save the white of the paper while I applied more colour to the painting.

Thank you for taking the time to visit my blog and look at the artwork.