Surface: Daler Board 24x20 ins.
Media: Water-soluble Oils
Date: Sept 2001
Source: Photograph and sketch done at the time.
Subject: Based on studies painted along the Pembrokeshire Coast during June 2001.
Colours Used: Pthalo Green Yellow Shade, Light Red, Titanium White, Ultramarine.
Brushes: As big as possible. Size 8 filberts, flats etc.
Time to complete: 4 hours, spread over 4 or 5 sittings covering about one month.
Demo: Paint your own Abstract
A previous article talked about the lessons any painter can learn from abstract art, regardless of your personal preferences. In this demo, I try to create an abstract painting by starting from a seascape and turning the abstract-o-meter up to 10...
A trip to the seaside earlier this year produced a short series of seascapes, some painted on site, others worked up later in the studio from sketches and photos. I enjoyed painting the sea in thin, watery veils of colour. Looking at those seascape passages I can see how close they come to abstraction. So for this demo I have in mind exploiting this to produce a pure abstract painting. The finished painting was horrible (as you'll see) but the experience was valuable!
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Tip: Decide what to Keep. Abstraction is all about reducing a painting to its bare essentials. Be like a chemist who distills pure liquids by boiling off impurities. Concentrate on the beauty of the paint surface you want to achieve. Concentrate on the subtle hues you want to create, or the textures you want to create in paint. Ignore everything else.
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Stage 1
I decide that I want to keep the horizon line between the sky and the sea. First, I paint in the sky area. I use a big brush and load it up with plenty of paint. I'm looking for 'happy accidents'. Maybe where one area of paint runs into anther, or two colours juxtapose in an interesting way. Whatever happens, I have to be open to every possibility at this stage. It can be a very exciting part of the process, because almost anything is possible.
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Everything is very loose and the watery paint runs a lot, but I try to be bold and graphic with my brushstrokes. The composition maintains the strong horizontal of the horizon between the sea and sky and matches it with a diagonal that relates to the line between the sea and the sand.
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Stage 2
After the painting from Stage has dried a little, I try to identify and enhance the bests bits. Where I like a paint effect, I try to repeat it somewhere that helps the composition. If I like a colour, I might try it in areas of the painting where it might work better.
If a part of the painting isn't working I'm quite happy to paint over it.
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Stage 3
I try to achieve a level of finish to all areas of the canvas. Its difficult to describe exactly what I'm aiming for here, but I'm trying to pull the whole canvas together using certain repeated brush marks. I think of Cezanne's paintings of the mountain in the South of France. Cezanne's chisel-like brushstrokes gave his canvases a lot of unity.
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Splodge, splurge, drip, crosshatch, drag paint over your canvases. Create a mini-lake of molten colours and run them together for spectacular effect. Remember you're not trying to paint a world-class abstract and no-one need see your mistakes. Use this as a liberating experience - you can go back to the style of painting you feel most comfortable with later.
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Books about Abstract Painting from Amazon: