Painting experiments - masking and gradients

While working on Gehenna, I want to make sure I'm developing my painting skills on other pieces alongside to ensure any human error moments/ mistakes take place on smaller, lower pressure paintings. I found an old paint pour I made in second year that I was never too enthralled with, I wasn't happy with the colour scheme or the composition and so I decided this would be a great piece to practice some techniques on, seeing as I wouldn't mind too much if the results were unsuccessful. 

I masked off the areas of the painting I wanted to preserve and left other areas bare, where I intended to paint a gradient over. I chose lilac and fuchsia to paint the gradient with, mixing slow drying medium into the acrylics and using a soft flat wide panel brush to add the pigment and blend the colours with. I thought by adding the lilac and fuchsia to the piece it would aid in creating a more visually pleasing colour scheme, which I believe was the case with this experiment. This was a great artistic inquiry to carry out as it allowed me to practice my masking skills (using a scalpel) and gradient/ blending skills, both of which have been quite difficult to master.

After this experiment I feel I learned more about how to mask properly, how to pair certain colour combinations to achieve certain aesthetic results and the basics of blending colours to achieve clean, seamless gradients - something I still need to improve at.  I'll take these developed skills into my painting of 'Gehenna' and employ the successful aspects of the experiment into the piece to achieve similar results.

Drawing experiments

Because I'm working on paper to create 'Gehenna', I want to make sure I'm continuing to draw with colouring pencils to ensure I'm fine tuning my drawing skills, enabling me to work flexibly with a plethora of mediums at play. This is important for me to keep practising as I'd love to use a variety of different mediums all within the same piece, creating a multi dimensional, visually diverse result.

As I have been learning a lot about Artemisia Gentileschi's work, the baroque period and the nuances of the styles of that period, I decided to try drawing a portrait over an incredibly dark paint pour experiment that I carried out weeks prior, to try and emulate the effects of Tenebrism, a popular style of painting seen through out the baroque period that harbours chiaroscuro features. Chiaroscuro is an Italian term meaning 'light-dark', in paintings the term refers to clear tonal contrasts of light and dark, often the darker tones dominating the majority of the image, allowing the sparse areas of light to really pop, creating a very dramatic and cinematic effect. 

I enjoyed the effect that was created by working over an incredibly dark background and adding minimal light linear drawings to overlay the paint pour. I'll definitely like to employ this technique in 'Gehenna' to enhance the dramatic atmosphere in the image. 

To achieve the best results, the brand and quality of pencil should definitely be taken into account. I noticed some of the cheaper pencils I used didn't show up over the dark background, yet when I used artist quality water colour pencils and chalk pencils the results were much more vibrant.

Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus, In Mourning and In Rage (1977)

An amalgamative performance piece and political protest, In Mourning and In Rage was created by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus in response to a series of unsolved rapes and murders in California that the police attributed to the Hillside Strangler.  

Artists, advocates, politicians, and the families of victims all converged on Los Angeles City Hall to perform a ritual of mourning and rage before the press. 

In a tightly choreographed event that challenged the media’s sensationalising and inadequate approach to reporting these crimes, 10 women dressed as 19th-century mourners, traveling to the steps of City Hall by hearse. Their faces obscured by black veils, each performer stepped forward to describe a form of violence against women, explicitly tying the horrors of the Strangler case to everyday abuse and harassment. “I am here for the 388 women who have been raped in Los Angeles between October 18th and November 29th,” one performer announced. “In memory of our sisters, we fight back!” responded the group in unison. 

With roots in both 1960s political theatrics and 1970s feminist consciousness-raising, the performance is echoed in public protests today. In 2017, activists dressed as characters from The Handmaid’s Tale, assembling in the Texas Capitol Rotunda to protest a bill limiting abortion rights. Their matching red cloaks evoked the dramatic red-and-black costumes of In Mourning; their anger was familiar, as well. 

Women wrapped in red cloaks and wearing white bonnets gathered in the halls of the Texas state Capitol on Tuesday, channelling "The Handmaid's Tale" to protest a slew of anti-abortion bills on the state's legislative calendar. 

Standing side by side, the women each held signs outlining the history of abortion restrictions passed in Texas in the decades since the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure nationwide.  

Abortion stories being read while the handmaids stand silently with the timeline of restrictions passed in Texas.