Go Big Or Go Home

Three at the Beach
48 x 60

This is the largest painting I've attempted to date.  It's been a work in progress for the past several months and has many, many layers.  The photo doesn't show it to its best advantage because it's darned hard to avoid any glare across such a broad expanse of canvas, and, after too much effort, I gave up.  The boy on the left is actually darker than shown.
But enough about camera stuff.  This piece required me to use a medium that I became familiar with in Alex Kanevsky's workshop last year: Liquin.  It's a quick dry medium used to extend paint.  It makes a tough, flexible film and it's what Alex uses to create the multi-layered work that he's famous for.  I don't know if it would be possible to use my usual medium of oil and OMS to create such a large number of layers safely; I'd be worried that the paint would crack.
It was great to be able to apply a layer of paint, and find it dry in one or two days.  That allowed me to stay interested in the painting in a way that would have been difficult if I had to wait for the usual 10 days or more for drying.
The downside of Liquin is its smell.  A bit like rubber cement or some other heady chemical, it did make my head spin if the studio door wasn't open while I worked.  It also destroyed a few brushes along the way as it seems impossible to totally clean it out of the bristles.  Some nice hogs' hair brushes are now decorative sticks thanks to Liquin.
The figures in the painting came from photos that I took at the beach last summer.  I liked the meandering, diffident feel to the poses of the figures on the right juxtaposed with the intensity of the boy on the left.  He seemed to contain a lot of energy in his small body and it was all focused on something at his feet; the water lapping?  A minnow?  The suction of the wet sand?  Everything's interesting when you're young, on summer vacation, and the sunshine is warm on your skin.
Happy painting!