This was just an exercise in the class yesterday, building up a classic English landscape using multiple layers. I wasn’t too pleased with it when I finished, but it had rather grown on me. A complex, technical watercolour, with a wax resist layer which looks like it was just thrown together.
We have just been for a few days in Vienna, and I was able to see my Egyptian Klimt in the flesh, as it were. She is one of the figures around the top of the main staircase. They are all wonderful, but I do like her the best.
She is hard to see, and even harder to photograph. But the setting with all the others is astounding. And then you get the best collection of Breughels in the world added in.
There is a telescope mounted across the staircase which lets you look at the paintings in detail, but it is so powerful that they are quite dark and you can only just about manage to see one eyeball at a time.
I tried my best with my little pocket camera.
We also visited the Belvedere, where I saw some of my other favourites, some badly photographed. There were many more.
This girl has been developing slowly over several weeks, and I still feel she is far from finished. Complex media. I knifed a layer of acrylic over a canvas board that had been sitting blank on my eagle for ages. A mixture of gold and burnt sienna, with touches of green and red, just to get a rich ground. Had no idea what to paint on it until I found an old black and white photo from I should think the 1960s with a beautiful closed pose, looking backwards at the viewer. I decided to try pastel for it, which was tricky, as it did not take too well to the acrylic surface. Some did stick and eventually an image built up.
I liked the pose, but it was incredibly fragile. Just a light brush of the surface and the image simply disappeared. I found that if I sprayed fixative (hairspray!) over her, it gave practically no protection, but further layers of pastel would adhere much more effectively.
Eventually I got a figure I felt was about done, but I had to fix her somehow, or she would never survive. More fixative stabilised her a bit, but I eventually resorted to an acrylic overlay, after two or three experiments on smaller panels. You can’t paint acrylic medium over pastel with a brush. The pastel will simply be pushed out of place by the friction of the brush. You have to towel a layer of medium over her with a palette knife, taking great care just to spread it over the pastel in one stroke, without any rubbing. Quite nerve wracking and slow, and the initial result looks terrible.
But gradually, as the medium dries, it goes transparent and she is revealed in all her glory.
She is not quite as fresh as the uncovered pastel, and she is shiny now, but she looks lovely. Future pastel takes well on the new surface, so although I now cannot remove anything, I can still work over the surface and add more. I think she needs more background, but that will take a few more weeks of thinking.
JEGS ART 