HUGE, BURLY CANVASSES [#281224]

28/12/24

Large figurative works are HARD. For one, you've got to use your whole body, at times swinging wildly your limbs to create great, sweeping, gestural marks to convey the impossible tension found in a flexing arm or the dense musculature of a working back. And because of the scale, it takes a long time to arrive at the place where the subtleties of the painting begin to reveal themselves. It's almost as if the universe has preordained that one must spend X amount of time and make Y amount of fuck ups before the real solution is gifted to us just as we are crawling on our hands and knees ready to throw in the towel.

I do like working big though. I can use my big bastard brushes that don't always get a run out and squeeze out a few quid's worth of paint ready to be slobbed on wi a palette knife. It is good fun.

Smaller works I tend to find softer and gentler and more intimate. Not always, but often. In a room full of huge, burly canvasses a little'ne can steal the show. In fact, it's not about being big or small. It's about things in relation to each other, things clashing against or working alongside. It's about the variance of things. I enjoy looking at the little shrubs and mushrooms and fallen twigs and leaves when I'm walking in the woods just as much as I like to marvel at the majesty of a large and aged oak tree. It's necessary to have both, one without the other and everything falls to pieces.

I'm looking through a huge book of Italian Art from across the ages and it's really inspiring to see how they made their figures glow, their use of transparent glazing techniques and lately I am loving their use of gold leaf. Gold leaf's not something I have ever tried that I can remember but it does look really cool, doesn't it? You can 'achieve that same luminosity, that sense of richness, with any paint that I'm aware of.