Large-scale painting commission • Part 2
June 2018. Painting commission, Soundscape 1, in progress on large un-stretched canvas on studio wall. It’s hard to read the scale from this photo, but the loose canvas is approximately 4’ x 5’ or 1.2 x 1.5m.
Doing this commission forced me to go large. Un-stretched, all the loose canvases from painting sessions in the same woods as the commission are large enough to lie down in. Just.
It was stretching, in more ways than one (groan) to work at this scale. And freeing. And it helped me find a mode of working where I’m less likely to fuss over detail. These paintings bring together fragments of seeing - many of the marks involve accurate but partial drawing (in paint) of the environment - and a more fluid reaction to sounds in the environment. Not synaesthesia exactly, but certainly a response, a notation in paint to what I was hearing.
June 2018. Two other large scale pieces happening the same time as the commissioned painting. Soundscape 2 on the right. Both approx 1.2 x 1.5m.
The work on the right, above, is Soundscape 2, resolved at the unnameable point where exterior environment interacts with sensory perception and my interior sense of composition. Energy, rhythm, colour and design all come together despite the usefully unfinished quality. It answers with my aesthetic sense of something being sufficiently finished.
Both Soundscape paintings synthesise the elements that came together in their making. They are paintings about the process of making paintings.
December 2018 - varnishing day.
Meanwhile, I was watching varnish dry, after Christmas.
A traditional high gloss varnish would be all wrong for this contemporary piece. But I needed to seal unpainted areas of white canvas and even out the glossier and more matt patches of paint (some containing bits of tree and airborne seeds).
Soundscape 1 now has a uniform even sheen, on the matte side of satin. The painting is protected, and can be cleaned without wiping off mixed media elements in the painting. Memories of a film with Mr Bean inadvertently dissolving the face of Whistler’s mother come to mind.
December 2018. In situ in clients’ home, Ella Clocksin (2018) Soundscape 1, acrylic on canvas, stretched size of work106 x 141 cm.