Family (probably still in progress)
12 x 16
I love the flourish and looseness of alla prima brushwork, but I'm also interested in making paintings that don't rely on the brush for their marks.
Inspired by one of my favorite painters, Philip Buller, this piece was an experiment in a rather laborious process of screen painting. I stretched aluminum window screen material over a frame and laid it on top of my canvas. Then I pushed paint through it with an old brush and a palette knife, aiming for an approximation of the placement of each color shape but no accuracy. I was really pleased with the look of the patches of colour, even the machine-like grid that's transferred to the paint. It's ambiguous but rich in pigment and color because I pushed quite a lot of paint through the mesh.
I can achieve vague edges with brushes, too, but the effect isn't usually so heavily pigmented. Instead, the paint is thinned and layered at edges, resulting in a weak color statement.
There's brushwork in the piece, too, but not much, and I didn't let it become the dominant method of mark making. In a few instances, I placed a blob of paint with the brush and then laid the screen on top and pressed the grid marks into it. The resulting impression was less defined than when paint was pushed through the screen but it helped unify the look of the surface.
This method is time intensive, but I'm going to keep working with it and see where it goes. I like the idea of integrating it with my more usual brush application because for me, the most interesting thing about a painting isn't the image, it's the paint quality. Anything that I can do to surprise the eye is work exploring.
If you're working with any unusual application methods and have the urge to share, I'd love to hear about them.
Happy painting!
