watercolors
I finished the third puffin painting! It's acrylic and watercolor on a 12x12" birch panel. The title, Little Brother of the North, is a direct translation of the Latin name of the Atlantic puffin, Fratercula arctica.
I've started a new series of paintings on the juvenile puffin, Toti, that I met at the tail end of my residency in Iceland in 2014. Toti was a puffling that failed to launch and imprinted on humans, so he is now a permanent resident at the Saeheimar Aquarium. I wanted to start on these pieces sooner, but better late than never.
Here's a sneak peak of progress on the first painting!
I am not a fan of using normal acrylic paint in a fine art context. Obviously other artists use them well, but I find they dry way too fast and permanently for my liking and additives like retardant and unlocking sprays don't do enough to mitigate that. I've always loved watercolor paints, and also am quite fond of oils, so I used to think I just wouldn't work with acrylics and that'd be that.
Then I started doing short-term artist residencies.
While some of my residencies had subject matter perfectly suited to watercolor, others had subjects that seemed to call for a more heavy-bodied paint... but the timeline of the residencies meant that oil paints wouldn't dry prior to transportation. I happened to have been gifted a full boxed Modern Colors set of Golden OPEN Acrylics at the 2010 College Art Association (CAA) Conference from a very nice representative, and so while on residency in 2014 when faced with one of these subjects that wanted a more substantial paint, I tried the OPEN Acrylics out. It was a revelation. These acrylics feel like what I always wanted the medium to be: they dry much more slowly than normal acrylics but much faster than oils, and yet still have the ease of normal acrylics, too - they can be thinned and cleaned up with water.
My previous dislike of acrylics was so strong that it took a while for this new world order to sink in, but there's really no denying it now - OPEN Acrylics are one of my favorite mediums.
This is not a sponsored post.
Recently, I was hired to do another commissioned painting of an amphiuma - an aquatic salamander with vestigial legs that looks like an otherworldly sea serpent or eel. My patron saw my first commissioned amphiuma painting done for Dr. John Pojman (it hangs in his office above his amphiuma Chrissy's aquarium) and wanted an original piece for herself.
The new amphiuma commission.
The previously commissioned portrait of John's amphiuma Chrissy.
Unfortunately, after mailing the new piece off to my customer and tracking it through delivery, there was radio silence. I worried that she didn't like the piece but also considered that she may have just been waiting to open it on a specific date (an upcoming birthday, for instance) so I made a mental note to send her an email in a week or two to check in. Before I could, she emailed me, and it transpired that the package was, in fact, not delivered (or possibly, not delivered properly and stolen off communal property).
Queue multiple weeks of back-and-forth with UPS, but finally the insurance paid out such that I had been paid to make the commission and my client received a refund on never having received the commission, so we were both made mostly whole again. Even though it's possible it's now lurking in a box in a UPS subbasement or was pawned for the value of the frame, I like to imagine the painting is hanging in a place of pride over a drug lord's couch somewhere. Since I do have the digital image, though, I can at least run off reproductions, so it's not completely lost to the world.
Here's the final painting I did while at the residency - I may well do more at home, but these five were completed while abroad. This one is acrylic and watercolor on aquabord and it's titled Darker Side.
Here's an acrylic and watercolor on aquabord. This one is titled Spirit.
In the first donkey painting, I used acrylic for the donkeys and watercolor for the background/foreground atmosphere. In this piece, I used both acrylic and watercolor in the body of the donkey in order to achieve the various levels of opacity and translucency as well as watercolor for background/foreground layering.
So if you've been thinking I've been a bit slower production-wise on this residency, you're right - I've been experimenting in mixing acrylics and watercolors and also trying out some new support boards and there's been some trial and error in figuring out how to combine them all together, plus acrylics are a slower medium for me than watercolors. I think I'm onto something, though.
This is acrylic and watercolor on claybord. I'm titling it Perspective.