Tag: abstract

Most of my attention lately has been poured into a project that at one point I intended to be a quick, messy, angry zine about Direct Provision. Now it’s a shaping up to be a series of approximately 30 small mixed media paintings.

It’s taken me a while and a fair amount of experimentation to decide what combination of techniques would let me get as close as possible to the pictures I see in my head when I think about how I want this work to look.

I’ve been reworking some old abstract paintings where I’d messed around with gesso and impasto acrylic trying to generate texture using knives, clingfilm, anything that came to hand. A layer of gold metallic acrylic paint acts like trapped light so that later layers of darker oil paint are infused with warmth. These upper layers of burnt umber and sienna tones can be scraped back to reveal a kind of internal glow, like heat trapped in the earth.   

sometimes there’s a strange red ash left behind in the fireplace and I don’t know what causes it – a certain kind of firewood, or something in the wood, perhaps – but I feel a compulsion to treat it as something precious, like some rare mineral given up by the earth.

I used it to make these small paintings (8 x 8″).

PVA glue, ash, charcoal, conte crayon & chalk on roughly primed board. (2019)