Dawn (working title)

This is the sacrificial painting from sometime in Level 2.

I forgot I’d started this post or that I’d somehow failed to keep the chronology of the work. The beginning point is an old collage to which I added a layer of white acrylic gesso mixed with salt after hearing an artist’s talk by someone who added salt to her media. The result is something like acrylic pumice gesso – rough and variably penetrable. At the beginning I had a beach-side path in mind but really didn’t like how that divided the space, so I returned to my more stabilising and to my mind less fussy format of a clear horizon.

In this instance, the colours are part-way borrowed from the collage beneath, as is the texture. This gave rise to areas that took paint smoothly, areas that resisted, and some that lifted from the underlying paper. I regard all of these as opportunities rather than unwanted intrusions, mostly because you have to have an idea in mind before anything can be said to intrude on it.

Reconstructing my thinking which, as always, followed the way the media worked together, I delineated the horizon, made a foreground of greens and blues, found a sliver of sea, then a cove, then revoked the cove’s permissions, and finally added some white crests which I darkened with dilute Payne’s Grey.

The clouds are pushed and pulled into being using a rough brush shoved and dragged around the space. Tiny dots of bright white go into places where clouds often reflect light, and dilute PG onto their undersurface.

And there it is, Pink Dawn.

SCH 2024