Chris’s Gallery

My first painting, made as a logo for Random Art Wednesday. I bought red, yellow, black, and turquoise paints and some black canvases to experiment with, and now those feel like my colors. I have stuck with them since. The movie Pulp Fiction was playing on my television when I began this painting, and I decided then that all of my paintings would be named after something a human voice spoke or sang in the movie.

恵 – Japanese Kanji meaning favor, blessing, grace.

䷾ – Hexagram 63 of the I Ching, commonly interpreted as Already Fording or After Completion. Its lower trigram is ☲, meaning radiance, fire. Its upper trigram is ☵, meaning gorge, water.

For a while now I’ve been familiar with the concept of a palimpsest, something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. Usually this refers to writing over partially erased words, but I wanted to create a painted palimpsest. The original painting can be seen below. Once completed, I spray painted a thin coat of flat black over that painting, let it dry completely, then removed some of the black spray paint with sandpaper. This gave me a black canvas with patches of darkened turquoise, yellow, and red showing through. This was the canvas on which I painted A Bowl Of Rice; you can still see some of these details behind the red bars. The Guns Of The Navarone was later painted on a new canvas using photographs of this test painting as a guide.

This painting was made entirely without the use of brushes. All paints used in this piece were dropped from their bottles onto the canvas and allowed to run their courses guided only by gravity. Once on the canvas, the paints were never physically touched.

The image below was a sort of test canvas for The Guns Of The Navarone. I painted the rough outlines of the American flag and knew that I was on the right track. But I would need to refine the painting to better match what was in my head. I spray painted a thin coat of flat black over the painting below, let it dry completely, then removed some of the black spray paint with sandpaper. This gave me a black canvas with patches of turquoise, yellow, and red showing through. This was the canvas on which I painted A Bowl Of Rice; you can still see some of these details behind the red bars. The Guns Of The Navarone was painted on a new canvas using photographs of the test painting as a guide.

I’ve never worked with tempera glitter paint before, and after this I never want to work with it again. It is difficult to apply, difficult to see, it dissolves underlying dried paint, and doesn’t give anything like the finished effect I was looking for. Still, I’m happy with the way this turned out, especially the weathering on the yellow stripes. I feel like I’m finally getting a real feel for making colors do what I want on black canvas.

This painting unfortunately sustained minor water damage when my roof and ceiling collapsed during a thunderstorm. The water damage has been cleaned as much as possible and a new sealant applied in an effort to restore and preserve the original colors. Unfortunately the new sealant darkened the piece significantly. This is the only photo of the painting’s original appearance before it was damaged.

This is my first painting in landscape orientation. I masked these triangles off one by one in order to get the geometric spiral I wanted. This painting required me to use approximately seventy-five yards of masking tape, which I would not have thought possible for this small a canvas. It was a time consuming process, but I love the results.

I recently read about camaïeu, which is the technique of painting an image entirely in tints of a single color. When camaïeu is done in yellow it is called cirage. The specificity of this word fascinated me, and I decided I wanted to paint a cirage geometric abstract. Camaïeu paintings are usually done in two or three tints. To reflect that, I painted this with the yellow tempera paint I normally use, plus two paints I have never used before: sunshine yellow gloss enamel and a translucent yellow matte spray paint meant for use on polycarbonate.

I painted this as a contest entry to help promote a friend’s business. It is my interpretation of the Mothman of West Virginia folklore. The version of the painting I entered in the contest can be seen below. After submitting it I repainted the trees in the background using the edges of thin metal plates instead of brushes. I have since ordered two differently sized palette knives and I will be using them from now on. They are a game changer.

I sketched this as an experiment/proof of concept to test a kinetic technique in which I moved my hand in a series of rapid elliptical strokes, never ceasing movement even when the pen/pencil wasn’t touching the paper. The shading under the model was scribbling; I never stopped moving the pen and it never left the paper. Unfortunately this sketch has gone missing, and after repeated failed attempts to locate it I have accepted it as lost. This is the only photograph that was ever taken of it, and is all that remains of this piece.