Today I decided to make a music video for the song Semi-Automatic-Woman-Marvelous-Machine, a task which I instantly and fantastically failed at having been tangented by wonderment and SO I decided, at the last minute, to design a Christmas card this year after all. So I'm doing that.
In the meantime, see this, my latest completed painting; The Invisible Woman. It's about childlessness and not having a family. With no family she is empty, past statue and part invisible, her reproductive organs dry and useless. It is my largest painting to date at around-and-about 70x120cm, far to large for me to transport to most exhibitions(!) or transport to the framers(!!) and so it's going to be difficult to see in real life(!!!). Okay so that's enough exclamations for now.
Here is a close up...
Now, some interesting technical wonderments...
1. The scanned painting is 300dpi and the image file is 8185x14197 pixels. I scanned it in 21 A4 sections on a flatbed scanner.
2. The figure is about half-life size.
3. The canvas is polyester, a brilliant surface but one that resists pencil drawing, so the underdrawing was transferred directly using oil paint. I've described how I've done it elsewhere on this blog.
4. There are three paint layers here. The first one was mostly in ashen greys and tone made of earth colours. The sky is/was cobalt blue on all layers, and this often produces a nice effect. That blue is technically more opaque than ultramarine but ultramarine is more powerful and dark and so needs much more opacifying white... so in practise cobalt is much more transparent for anything except dark tones, which it's quite useless for anyway. The rainbow colours were all grey greens on the palette, gentle mixes with the sky blue, proving that colours are relative. The top layer made everything much stronger.
Here's another detail...
I have no family, although like most of my work the painting is not autobiographical but inspired by my interpretations of other people and/or situations.
