paintings prints and stuff

close ups of the image from yesterday The paper was a pale grey, the whites are oil paint put on with a flat brush in single strokes between the branches, leaving bits of the grey flickering through the entire image. They would make interesting large canvasses if only I could keep them that simple .... ..... large brushes .... lots of paint ...... and time ....

January Snow. Vivien Blackburn A painting that started out as a monoprint demo and ended as a mixed media piece. About 10/11 inches tall. The monoprint was done using oil paint on acetate, printed onto paper wet with turps. I then worked into it with a colour shaper and a brush, using more oil paint and then a graphite stick to draw through the wet paint. The graphite stick worked beautifully on the turpsy surface, gliding across it and making intense oily marks.

Over on our group Watermarks blog Lindsay has just done an interesting post on Kurt Jackson. Tomorrow I'm doing a follow up to it. It made me digress into influences on our work and the importance of looking at other artists past and present, learning, but retaining our own 'voice'. We are all influenced, consciously or unconsciously by work we see. David Prentice quotes Rupert Bear (childrens books) as an influence with their aerial viewpoint in the illustrations. :>) His work has this wonderful feeling of flying slightly above the scene but isn't remotely illustrational. I love marks - splatters and scratches and brushmarks and knife marks, drawing with a twig to get those lovely not-quite-predictable marks I also love colour and masses and line. I spent some time managing to work out how to unite my disparate interests into a cohesive image when I was at college. Influences range from KJ to Monet, Turner, Gwen John, Joan Eardley, Egon Schiele (lo...

seahorses. monotype. approx 14 ins tall. Vivien Blackburn This is an old piece of work that I have on the wall in the bathroom - a monotype I did in the first year of my degree. It is actually a normal rectangle but as it's behind glass I had to take the photograph at an angle because of the reflections. it was made by rolling out a varied mix of turquoise printing ink onto a metal plate and printing it onto the paper using an etching press (rather like an old mangle with a flat bed but rather more expensive :>( ) - inking up the whole plate with a thin layer. It was left to dry overnight and then I made stencils, cutting and tearing newsprint freehand with no drawing to make the sea horses and weed. These were positioned on the turquoise print. Then I rolled up the plate with a dark midnight blue and put it through the press again - where the newsprint was it remained variegated turquoise and the deep background appeared. This was the first time I'd used this tech...