The Wind Cries Mary

I was short of ideas today, so watched a few Jean Lurssen videos on YouTube for inspiration.  I was impressed by one "exercise" she did (for exercise, read something that I'd be proud to call a painting) where she loaded up the edge of a credit card with paint straight from the tube, scraped it across the paper, squirted on some water to let it run down the paper, then added sky and trees and called it a day.  I thought I'd have a go.

The main three colours I used were Payne's grey, light red and raw sienna, making this, at least in theory, a painting in the key of green warm.  Cadmium red, cobalt blue and transparent yellow also made appearances later, along with acrylic inks.  Payne's grey doesn't appear often these days but Jean gets great results with it and light red needs to be used up at some point (it has no future on my palette).  So with the idea behind this painting being to use paint straight from the tube, it was the ideal chance to give both of them an outing.

In the video, I believe Jean used hot pressed paper, which is really smooth and tends to be used by realistic botanical artists.  Not my sort of thing, not my sort of paper.  With my cold pressed, rougher, paper, I found that the paint I spread on was finding nice comfy spots at the bottom of troughs and was resistant to being spread over the paper.  This is probably why I ended up putting on far more paint than I should have done.  The other mistake I made was to mix up some of the paint as I was applying it, tempted in by the lovely greens that I could mix.

Anyway, when I sprayed on the water, these two mistakes became apparent, the first one in how far down the paper the paint ran before turning into watery dribbles and the second in how all the colour turned to mud.  There were lessons there.

Anyway, I added a sky using my three main primaries, starting by letting some of the foreground paint dribble up into the sky area.  I added lots of Payne's grey and a bit of light red.  The trees were added at some point with acrylic inks (Earth red, indigo and sepia).

And then I tinkered.  I tried to clear the mud in the foreground by pushing the paint around with a big brush against the bristles.  I tried adding more colour, including cobalt blue and cadmium red.  And I added on lots of alcohol inks, with a touch of granulation medium.  Nothing really worked so, in desperation, I flicked on all sorts of alcohol inks (even including waterfall green).  I didn't discriminate between foreground and sky; everything went everywhere.  At one point some cauliflowers appeared in the sky behind the tree on the right - I painted over them with Payne's grey to get some background hills or trees.

I've ended up with something that's not a perfect painting but one that does convey the way that the wind cuts through you out on the moors in the autumn.  There's all sorts of stuff being blown around but you don't care what it is: you just want to get home.  It's a painting that generates an emotional response in me and hopefully in others.  It's up for sale.  I couldn't find an Algernon Blackwood story to name it after (The South Wind didn't really cut it) so I went for a Hendrix track.