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Mud wrestling

30/3/2018

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"Rock of Ages" 12 x 12 impasto oil on wood panel
Once in a while, it’s fun to change up your game.  Several weeks ago we had a terrific workshop with Laurel McBrine on impasto or palette-knife painting.  She had me at “no medium needed” and “no brushes to clean.”   I had brought along a digital of one of my favourite cliff faces.  Yes, I am aware that other, more normal, folks have favourite shoes or vacation spots or desserts.  I have favourite cliffs, some of which I have already painted (see “Bay Bulls” 1 through 4 on my gallery website) and a great many more which I am just dying to paint.  I visit this particular cliff on a regular basis, in all seasons, but had never gotten around to painting it until now.

Even though it is probably limestone and subject to constant change, I think of my cliff as “Rock of Ages” and get all fluttery whenever we paddle past it.  So during that workshop I hauled out my reference shot and a cradled wood panel and went for it. 

Working impasto is a bit like mud wrestling  — sloppy but fun as hell (I imagine…).  You load up the knife with a pile of pigment and toggle back and forth between control and chaos.  Woo Hoo!

A hunk of my ancient wisdom rests on the knowledge that everything has its price.   To start, this love child cost me a good pair of leather gloves because there was half a pound of quicksilver pigment on her by end of the day and I had to get her home.  And while I may have noticed that I had used ten times the usual amount of pigment, I failed to translate that into drying time, especially when there is no alkyd to speed up the process.  Good luck trying to find a dust-free dog-hair-free storage around here these days!  Three weeks later, the surface is dry to the touch but I imagine that centuries will pass before the painting dries thoroughly.

​Don’t care.  This was too much fun to miss.  And if we ever decide to clone Theodore, there is a mother lode of hair to work with.
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