Paint is fun stuff to play with, and I have recently had some time to do just that. For much of the time my paintings involve fairly slow, even tedious processes, but once in a while I get to to do some high-volume mark making.
I just did a big summer re-supply. This paint will actually last me way past the summer, but I am hoping to use up a fair amount in the next two months. Unpacking a shipment of paint is a bit like finding a bunch of colorful easter eggs or opening a container of confections. Mostly I've been using Gamblin with Archival Mediums- Archival is an Australian company whose alkyds have some proprietary chemistry that allows the paint film to retain flexibility even when it has dried (sorry if you aren't a paint nerd). I also have a bunch of Daniel Smith oils and a few colors from Langridge, a company that does small-batch hand made paint.
Initially I put this painting away since a depiction of a beached whale just seemed too, uh I don't know... pessimistic? My feelings have changed now that I've spruced it up by turning the beach into a colorful expressionistic soup! Fun times!
Using matrices, masks and stencils with oil paint generates a lot of colorful rubbish. Actually, I may turn some of this stuff into other pieces. Paint is not all that different from certain types of printing ink, and working this way brings up memories from my screen printing past.
This painting was on the shelf for a while because I wasn't happy with the way that the sky turned out. Once again, glop can come to the rescue. Here are two applications after the painting has had a mask applied to it.
And now the masking is off. The removal involves a lot of careful, messy peeling which I actually enjoy for some reason. These aren't the greatest photos obviously, but I am happy with the final result on this painting. For a couple of years I thought I was just going to trash it. Glad I didn't.