Tag: oil

This is just a scroll of paper taped to the wall that I add to now and again when other paintings aren’t going well. It’s like knitting or chewing the cud. It passes the time.

I suppose it’s abstract, but that seems the wrong word by now because I know its forms so well that revisiting it feels like walking down a familiar street. It seems obvious where everything is in relation to each other. Abstraction usually feels vague, that’s its appeal; shapes morph and colours bleed and planes shift. This one feels more like a lovely, horrible, old misshapen teddybear: to anyone else, it’s probably hard to tell what it’s meant to be, but I’ve spent so much time with it I think it’s perfectly clear. It’s meant to be what it is.

Oil on paper, 21×42"

I’m learning to use oil more like watercolour. The key is lots and lots of turpentine. So much turpentine that the fumes make you slightly headachey and you wonder if the cat glaring in the window is a hallucination but it isn’t so you feed it some ham. 

Oil on canvas 12X16"

A ridiculously large (6-foot) oil painting of some rocks, mainly. Still a work in progress and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The problem with working on a scale like this is that you can spend five solid hours working on it, step back, and it will not appear to have made the slightest damn difference.