Olé! Trumpets of joy resound and echo through the empty halls of dead kings and princes about to be reborn! A new painting is complete and the walls of granite rock shatter in awe at it's arrival.
Ordovician Landscape, is a painting originally made for the Jobling Gowler art competition, which was later replaced because I was unhappy with it. The Ordovician period is an ancient geological period, thus the landscape represents ancient times, but also the birth of something new, the setting aside of an eclipse (what isn't obvious from the blurry photo is a tiny bird flying free in the streams of golden sunlight). SO the painting is about rebirth itself AND so too has it BEEN reborn, coming out better after glazing than it was in the underpainting stage. Long had it waited too, since it was initially transcribed to M.D.F. in January, fermenting and seeded, ready for today's emergence.
Yesterday I painted some initial colour studies for "The Quest for Pity on the Road to Self-destruction" a painting about someone who self-harmed to gain attention, an idiotic doomed quest, a forlorn hope, but here with some salvation. This is a giant painting although not overly complex, but there are a number of options for colourations; the sky can be just about anything to convey the mood but as the foreground monolith must ideally be yellow or pink or something like that, the sky will benefit most from being a cool colour; violet or green being the most obvious. Work is ongoing.
A third painting was completed on Tuesday, Romeo and Juliet 2, but I'm unhappy with it's simplicity and inaccuracy in shadow modelling. It's an erotic (but minutely broken) arrow made of sexual parts gently pressing into some soft flesh, rendered like a landscape. Such a delicate and fantastical subject needs to be rendered to perfection. I might repaint it.
Oh, finally, my "Abandoning a Friend" painting has made it into the open exhibition at the Chester Grosvenor museum, so I'm happy about that. It'll be on show until mid-June; if anyone is in the city between now and then.
Another open competition has been launched for artists in the region; the Stockport Open. You can get details and an entry form on this website. Go on, have a go! :)
