acrylic – Page 10 – The Consulting Artist

Growing Pains – Arizona

I’m currently experimenting with scaling up my work. I often work between postcard size and A4 and having enjoyed wrestling with something a little bigger recently, I decided to go one step further. I bought a box of 20 inch x 16 inch canvases, opened the box, took a deep breath and dived in.

I tore into this experiment quite hastily. So far I have five works in progress and having paused for breath, I confess I’m not quite sure where I’m going…yet. I will share them all with you soon, and right now, here is the one that is currently catching my eye.

The working title is Arizona – there’s a sense of heat emanating from the work.

I applied the orange as a watered down acrylic wash. This is the first time I’ve watered down acrylic and I like the way a few heat spots have appeared on the surface. I didn’t want complete coverage, so I’m happy that the brush dragged a little and allowed a few grains and bumps of canvas to show here and there. The blocks are painted in titanium white.

I can’t decide if this is finished or not. I’m torn between enjoying the simplicity and feeling there is something missing. I may hang it at home for a while and see how my feelings towards the picture develop. More to follow soon

Easily Broken

I’m giving a short talk on meditation at the Workplace Trends conference in London next week. Increasingly I’m making time to develop and use my art as a way of preparing visual aids in my work. Most of the visuals in next week’s talk are hand drawn and painted and I’m sharing one element of that with you now. Part of the talk focuses on human fragility in an emotional context. I designed this cutout – which I’ve titled Easily Broken – to illustrate this. My friend George LaRoque told me he likes the design so I’m going to give it to him when I see him in Paris soon.

I decided to develop the idea a little further and the one piece of art has now become a triptych. I added red, possibly to symbolise lifeblood, into version two, and then in version three I went darker. I hardly ever use black paint and on this occasion I wanted to stay with the monochrome of the cutout pieces. As you can see – I put a couple of the cutout pieces out of sync in this third version.

While mixing the acrylic for V2, this paint flower briefly appeared on the palette. I photographed it before it disappeared into the mix and I’m including it here as it too was easily broken.

The Chinese Art of Listening

I’m in the middle of preparing some illustrations for a client, one of which needs to represent good service. I got stuck for ideas, so I asked Twitter for some visual cues to help describe what good service looks like. Among the replies, Meg Peppin suggested that because good service comes from paying attention, I should explore the Chinese symbols for listening. My curiosity aroused, off I went – and here is my attempt at representing what I found.

Ears are represented in the top left, eyes in the top right. In the bottom right we have the heart, separated from eyes by a line representing focus, and in the bottom left we have the mind. Together they stand for wholehearted listening, paying full attention. I struggled making this with acrylic paint and a stuff brush so I had another go with a bottle of black ink.

The shapes flowed better this time though I was still using the same stiff brush. Lastly, I returned to some acrylic paint and had a go at abstracting the characters representing focus and heart. This time I made a thick mix of paint and tried to create some depth in the shapes I painted. You may be able to see this effect better in the close up picture.