Taking on board the feedback from my tutor I have been making some minor alterations to a couple of my shell paintings. Emma had commented that Shell Storm would benefit from the white lines being a little less overstated and the texturing in the central white and cream area worked particularly well. I agreed with her critical feedback and so I have just made some subtle changes, in particular creating a more textured feel to other parts of the image and also shaving down some of the white lines.
The second painting that Emma commented on was the Shell Cloudscape done in oils on a 100 x 100 cm canvas. Again, I agreed with her comment that one particular portion of the image felt awkward, it had been bothering me as although it was a representation of the actual shell structure it made the painting feel clumsy. I therefore decided that a small change would be beneficial to the overall feel of the painting.
Most of my work using shells has been based on the inside patterns with their flowing lines made up of the thin strata of shell. However, the outer surface of the shells has a different structure that is made up of strong ridges that radiate out forming a protective shield.
I thought it might be interesting to try working in a more textured way, and having had the opportunity to chat with St Ives artist Stephanie Sandercock while I was last in Cornwall, I decided to use some of her techniques involving the building up of surface texture with material and layering and sanding back acrylic layers on top.
I have been using wall tile adhesive to create the texture which dries to a hard surface when applied over well-gessoed canvas.
As a source image I used a close up shot of one of the shells:
I chose this portion of the shell as I liked the fan-shaped structure and the colour combination.
Working on a 60 x 60 cm canvas I built up the texture of the ridges and gullies:
I used liquid acrylics with an extender medium to allow me to work wet-in-wet and for the ‘gullies’ I first filled them with Payne’s Grey and then ran a bead of Titanium White along one edge before tilting the canvas to carefully let the white run into the still-wet grey.
The ridges were then worked and rubbed back to build up the right level of texturing:
The way in which I had run the white into the grey definitely seems to have increased the three-dimensionality of the painting. I might work on the ridges a bit more to get a greater variation in colour and tone.
As a follow up to Shield I used the same technique on another painting but this has not worked so well, probably due to the less interesting structure and the lack of diversity, and so this has been shelved for the time being,
I have been working on possible layouts for the upcoming exhibition using scale drawings in photoshop and trying different arrangements of my artworks and it felt that things would benefit from a second large scale oil painting to give balance to the Cloudscape painting. With this in mind I have been working on a shell painting based on the inner surface pattern of an oyster shell.
What attracted me to this image was its ethereal feel, it reminds me of an image taken by the Hubble Telescope of the Eagle Nebula (an image often referred to as ‘The Pillars of Creation’). This idea set me fancifully thinking, whilst I was painting, about how the oyster spending its existence in the confines of its shell, might set about creating its own universe scattering stars, clouds, seas and mountains as if it were Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, of even a god of creation.
This will need a bit more detail work carrying out once it has dried a bit more but I like the way it is progressing.
