painting

But should I call it Brexit?

In early October I visited a small informal group of artists, hosted and instructed by Brigid Marlin, in which I have been progressing my most ridiculously slow painting yet.

The technique being used is the mische technique – and for full details I again direct you to Brigid’s comprehensive website – which interleaves layers of white egg tempera (or a suitable and less capricious substitute) with transparent oil glazes of red, then yellow, then blue. On top of the blue layer, once dry, oils are painted directly but thinly… followed by yet more layers of white egg tempera (or substitute) and oil paint glazes which are used to unify some elements of the painting, pull bits forward and push others back. All rather more subtle and difficult to get the hang of than my usual method of bung-the-pastels-on.

Suffice it to say, it transforms the already time-consuming process of oil painting into something that takes me aeons to complete (I think I started it in January 2018). Given the time-to-achievement ratio, it’s probably not going to be a technique I specialise in – but I am really enjoying seeing this painting emerge…

Aftermath of the SAAS Exhibition…

A mere 21 days after the end of the exhibition, I have scrambled on top of my backlog enough to actually post something about it… this bodes ill for my organisation regarding the upcoming Herts Open Studios, but more on that in later posts.

In summary, the St Albans Art Society summer exhibition went very well in general, with some rather spiffy pictures of it available here and here on the society website. It also went well for me personally, as I came out of it with my pastel of Cedar the Eagle owl sold and three commissions for more. Moreover the same owl got voted in as second-most-popular framed picture in an exhibition with over 200 entries; most flattering ^^. Owls for everyone!

Alas, my still life did not meet with the same success and has returned to its dust-gathering location against a wall.

My final entry to the exhibition is the oil painting ‘Thundercats’ featured at the top of this post. It took half of forever to paint and earned barely a glance, but hey, I like it. I would love to upload a good image of this into the website gallery proper, but my camera is simply not up to the task and the above offering (smushed together in the middle to edit out all the varnish reflections) was the best I could get.