Lunamoth

Mississippi River in Carleton Place; 10 x 12, open acrylics on canvas

Yesterday I had the opportunity to try Golden’s Open Acrylic paint for the first time.  I’d been curious about it since I first heard about it last year.  My painting teacher, Cheryl Chartier, held a six-hour workshop to introduce us to the paints.  We were able to try them out and decide whether or not to make the investment in buying them for ourselves.

I was first surprised by the liquidity and transparency of the paint.  I had thought it would be more the consistency of oil paint, but it’s somewhere between regular and liquid acrylics.  The transparency is great for luminous colours and lovely glazes (with open gloss medium).  The paint had a lot more “brush drag” than I was expecting, but that was easy enough to get used to.

Normally, I use a stay-wet palette for my paint.  With the open paint, I used a couple of those disposable palette sheets (wax paper).  After three or four hours, the open paint on the palette was slightly tacky but still very workable.  There is a thinner available that you can either spray over the paint or mix into it to bring it back to its original condition.

I don’t usually have a problem blending regular acrylic paint because I work fairly quickly, so I wasn’t finding the extra open time that useful for blending.  In fact, once the open paint is a little tacky on the surface, it is very easy to pick up a passage that you may not want to pick up.  The timing of using these paints is different from the usual acrylics, obviously.  I found myself inadvertently picking up paint that I wanted to leave on the canvas more than once.  Largely because of this, I don’t think I would enjoy using the open acrylics for entire paintings; I know how to use regular acrylics and can do what I want with them without thinking too much about it.

Where the open acrylics shine, in my opinion, is as glazes.  The paint is well-suited to it, and the colours are luminous and clear.  Layering glazes in a classic oil style would be a great way to use these paints.  One thing I may try soon is mist effects using open acrylics (another student in the workshop was painting a misty water scene, and it was looking pretty good).  The open paint can be mixed with regular acrylics to extend their open time, or you can paint open over regular (Golden suggests letting a painting dry for at least a month before glazing it, so painting regular over open is only feasible if you’re willing to wait a loooong time).   As long as the open paint isn’t thoroughly dry, it can be re-opened and reworked.

My local art supply store sells “modern” and “traditional” intro sets of six small tubes of paint for $24 Cdn each; next time I’m feeling spendy, I’ll probably pick one of them up, along with the medium and thinner.  For me, I think the open acrylics are a good addition to my regular paints, but not a replacement.

A little more work done on the painting

In last Friday’s painting class I worked some more on my mostly-knife painting of the Mississippi River near Carleton Place.  As you can see (if you compare it to the first picture of it in a previous entry), most of what I did was in the trees at the back.  Slowly but surely, it’s moving along in a direction I like.  I’m having a little trouble with the values — there is so much dark in those trees.  It’s a challenge to keep them under control, and keep the colours from sinking into a mass of dark brown/green.

I also worked a bit on the tree standing at the left of the canvas; I think having it there gives a bit of depth to the rest of the picture.

It’s always difficult to talk about my painting; as Hans Hofmann said, “Painters must speak through paint, not through words”.  However, someone did ask why I chose this particular subject (she knows who she is), and it made me think about that.  I’m working from a photograph that was taken on an overcast autumn day when Frank and I were scouting for photographic subjects at a particular spot on this river (I asked Frank to take this photo for me; it wasn’t a scene that he would have chosen himself).  I liked the reflections in the water and the general composition (although I’ve simplified that quite a lot from the photo).  I wasn’t so crazy about the colours, all greyed-out and pale.  So, I decided to make my painting a sunny day (which you can tell by the blue of the water and sky; there will also be more light and shadow stuff happening to the logs and bush in the front of the painting when I get to that bit).  What I’m aiming for in the end is a quiet afternoon mood.  We’ll see how that goes….