Jan 27th Appropriation and big brushes..and oil pastels.

Found an appropriated image by photographer Sherrie Levine - After Walker Evans. Thought it would be interesting to paint a photograph of a photograph using paint.  I need to look more at appropriation because I work from photographs. 

It's something that keeps coming up in relation to my practice and I need to really dig into it to understand it better. 

Original Walker Evans below left and the first big brush sketch.

 

I quite like the sketch - it's not totally accurate but non of my sketches really are -  but I like the positioning and brush marks.

Baldy came over while I was painting and said it was like watching something repeatedly slowly emerge and be erased over and over.  

I was bouncing around the canvas blocking and wiping and moving things around with smaller paintbrushes, and decided to go back to the big brush to get the broader marks. 

This had worked for the last painting.

The brush was quite dry so I could use it to blur - which I liked and led me to drag the paint across the whole face; then I could work some facial features back in keeping her sitting in the blurred background. 

I think she sits in the place better.

                                            

Details of the face. I want to keep the face shape and features but treat it so that it pulls and pushes out of the canvas.

I'm letting this dry so that I can come back and use some thinners to pull textures out (there's a roughly applied gesso underneath which I can see through the brush strokes and I really want to lift the textures into the painting)... and rework / add details where I want them.

I'm also thinking about other ways that I can incorporate sketchy gestural lines into my work and looked back to the small sketchy plan that I made for my witch works. I used procreate to add some lines to see how they operate.

I'm thinking about introducing some oil pastels to add lines to the oil paint.  This operates in the same way as my small sketches but on a larger scale. 

I've always hated oil pastels. It's the one art medium that I don't own...but maybe this is where they hold their own.

This is Brian Patterson. Jenny Saville uses oil pastel in her works over oil too, to bring in movement and pops of colour. 

I'm hoping that if I can work larger to create the layers of tones and textures that I want in the sketching- out and filling in stage - (with big / assortment of brushes and rags )then I can add detail where I want it and finally, add back sketch lines with the oil pastel, then I can get the painting to operate in the way that I want.