Mangoes and stats

Mangoes, acrylic on canvas, (c) Mary Adam

Mangoes was painted between May and September this year. 

 

End of year figures 2013

No proper statistics  since I didn't do an end of year post this time last year and am no longer using a hit counter except for Blogger's own minimal Stats.

Subscribers, email and RSS:  115 (about the same as 2011) (from Feedburner)
Posts in 2013:  35, up from 16 in 2012 (34 in 2011).
Page views -- the total is now 99,205 and is averaging about 2400 2200 page views/month.

Monoprint experiments

Today I took a break from painting and had some fun experimenting with monoprinting. I used acrylic screenprinting ink which is quick and easy to use and to clean up, but harder to control on the plate than oil-based inks. The plate was a nice thick piece of glass with polished edges and I have a stack of old blank letterheads for taking trial prints. On the downside, I found that an image which looks bright and vivid on the plate may lose some of its vitality on paper. But overall it's a great way to explore the formal aspects of making art. Plus, these are very amateurish efforts, I have a ways to go to get one good print.

Amendment, Sunday June 7, 2009:

Is it "monoprint" or "monotype"? The terms are often used interchangeably but the purists prefer "monotype". Here's what Monoprints.com says:

"The two terms monotype and monoprint are often confused and need clarification. A monoprint is a print created through any technique (lithograph, etching, woodblock, etc.) that is altered after it has been printed. Each print is different from the other, as the artist works each etched or worked plate individually, adding color or wiping the ink differently each time a print is pulled. A monotype is the printing of an image from a clean, unworked surface containting no scratching, carving or drawing. The main difference is that with monotypes editions are impossible to pull."

The distinction between monotype and monoprint is relatively new, however, dating back only to 1978 when it was introduced by exhibition curator Jane Farmer (info from History of the Monotype by William Jung).

Oil or acrylic?

Guitar Player, acrylic on canvas, about 8" x 8"

Which is better, oil or acrylic? Why use one rather than the other?

For a while now I've been using mostly acrylic. It's better suited for the kinds of things I've needed to do for OCA courses, and it's definitely better for packing up and sending off to a tutor. It dries quickly and can be overpainted far more easily than oil. Acrylic gear is lighter than oil to carry outdoors. It's less messy to clean up than oil, needing only soap and water. It's almost essential for many contemporary techniques such as layering and dripping and a lot of mixed media work.

But it has big disadvantages too. The main one is that the paint shrinks as it dries, losing up to a third of its volume. This means that a passage that looked well-covered while being painted can end up looking thin and streaky after the paint is dry. Acrylic also gets more transparent or darker as it dries because the binder is a glue which is white and opaque while wet, but which dries clear. These two together, the shrinking and the darkening, mean that what you see is not what you get.

Guitar Player, oil on canvas, approx 7" x 7"

Oil on the other hand is far harder to work with than acrylic. Any given piece is more likely to be a total failure, and it's messy while working and to clean up. But to give oil its due, if you leave a brush overnight loaded with paint, little harm will come to it (though it's not a good idea). A major plus is that the colours are the same when dry as when wet, the only medium where this is so. Despite all its difficulties I prefer working with oil and get more of a feeling of achievement if a piece comes out well.

But the bottom line is that both have their pros and cons, and personally I wouldn't want to be without either. Now that I'm venturing into printmaking the same issues are beginning to crop up. Oil-based inks or water-based? Some things never change.

Beginnings series, No. 1 stage 1

The revised series for my major project is provisionally titled "Beginnings". In addition to the other things, I thought about the size, the surface and the medium. The maximum size is limited by the cost of sending the work to England eventually, but for this project I wouldn't be working at a large size anyway because of the silkscreen prints which will be part of the process. So the size will be 16 x 22", and the surface will be canvas which I like because it's versatile and tough. The medium can't be oil because of the silkscreens so I'll do the series in acrylic. I still have to decide between thick paint or thin and drippy paint in transparent layers. Either could work, and a combination of techniques could work too. I feel I will need to maintain some sort of consistency across the series, to bolster its identity, but I'll go with a combined approach for now to give myself flexibility. The first piece will be a sort of pilot. If it doesn't go well I may need to rethink the process.

Beginnings, first stage of first piece

The subject for the first piece is the same as the first one for the original "Transitions" project but with different handling, and this is the first stage, the basic division of the canvas, which I chose to do in thirds. After a couple of days of studying the result, I'm thinking I don't have enough space in the foreground and will need to fix that. But at least acrylic is easily overpainted and I can change it. I fear it will be a very ordinary landscape but at the same time I'm determined to be positive about it, it's been way too long already.

Brushes and acrylics

Click on photo to enlarge

This is what acrylic does to brushes, I don't know why. It might be that the acrylic causes the bristles to become brittle so they break more easily. Such wearing-down doesn't happen with oils. For this reason I use cheap brushes for acrylics and replace them often. Just today I got four flats, sizes 7 to 9, for less than one US dollar each.

There are times, though, when the job needs a good brush, and for those times I have the set shown below, which I think are made of nylon or something similar. They have lovely spring and precision and are a joy to work with. They were far from cheap so I'm taking the very greatest care of them.

Worldwide Paint-Out

The Trinidad Art Society's Plein Air group took part in the 6th Annual Worldwide Paint Out on September 5-7, 2008. On Sunday 7, about a dozen members of the group met opposite Stollmeyer's Castle in the Savannah from around 9 a.m.  More info here.

The Art Society provided a spacious tent which turned out to be a godsend. Shortly after midday one of the worst downpours of the rainy season drenched practically the whole of Trinidad and put a stop to any further outdoor painting for the day. Up to that point the weather was bright and sunny and we had a pretty good turnout and a good day. I took along a bunch of very small boards, about a dozen, but managed only three small sketches before the rains came. These two are acrylic, about 6" x 8".

Out to the Savannah

Flamboyant, acrylic sketch, approx 10 x 12"

On Tuesday this week I went with the Plein Air Picassos to the Savannah to paint a spectacular Flamboyant tree in bloom. It was a fun outing. I arrived first at 8:05 am and did a pencil study in my sketchbook before anyone else arrived, and then another. Caroline Mair was next and she did a lovely drawing in black oil paint on the open spread of a small sketchbook, very graphic and striking. Then the others showed up in a bunch.

It was a scorching hot day and although I'd carefully chosen a tree with deep shade, I still got some sunburn (trying to avoid getting that greasy sunscreen on my hands) -- but it wasn't too bad and is fading.

The two preliminary studies were a help. I went with the second one which had a better composition. Lisa O'Connor says that the tree with the pinkish-mauve flowers on the left is called the Queen of Flowers (Lisa joined the group too). It's a very beautiful tree with flowers growing vigorously upwards. This is the season of flowering trees in Trinidad, first the pink and yellow Pouis a few weeks ago, now the Flamboyants and the Queen of Flowers.

The image above is the acrylic sketch that resulted from the session. The second photo is of me at the scene, taken by Peter Sheppard, showing my outdoor set-up, which is actually quite lightweight though it looks like a lot. I wish people wouldn't do it (take photos of me) but what's done is done and there you have it. And it's rather nice to have this as a reminder of the occasion so I'm not complaining.

The only difference for oil is that I use a French easel. It's a lot heavier, more gear to carry, so recently I've been leaning towards acrylic for outdoor work.

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Acrylic tips

Here are two things about dried acrylic paint I haven't seen elsewhere:

1) When acrylic paint dries it becomes more transparent than it looks when first put on. Most sources say it dries darker, which is probably true, but it's also more transparent and therefore streakier. The reason is that the binder or glue that holds the pigment together is opaque or semi-opaque when wet (whitish), but it dries clear. This is merely my own observation, not a scientifically proven fact.

2) A brush ruined by acrylic paint drying and hardening in the bristles makes a good stick for stirring cans of paint.

Untitled

Untitled, acrylic on panel, 14 x 10" approx, 2006

I decided to post two images today because I'm expecting to be busy for the next few weeks. The bottom of this one is cut off, it didn't quite fit on the scanner. It's based on a drawing of a heron and a gull on an estuary in West Cork, Ireland, and except for the birds it's imaginary. In fact it was done before my last show but it was so different from the rest of that work that I kept it back, and now it's all on its own, a strange and lonesome little piece. Maybe I'll do another to keep it company.