Oil painting by subtraction.

'In Friedrich's landscape painting, rather than obscure the sense of infinity, the clouds and fog intensify the troubling awesomeness of the Void. The dark skies also reflect his moodiness. On one level, Friedrich's paintings are mindscapes that mirror his psychic condition and his spiritual yearning for union with the infinite, not landscapes that solely mirror nature.' (Levy M. 2005 'Void' p.88)

'The Constant Library',  Volume XXXI: "The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton".

"The idea for 'The Constant Library' follows on from a recent conversation considering which books had, and continue to have, the greatest affect my life in a variety of different ways. These are the books I can't live without and whenever possible I have a copy of with me wherever I travel in the world; my 'Constant Library."

If you only ever read one book about philosophy  this should be the one. It could easily be retitled 'The Really Useful  Book of Philosophy', as de Botton's approach to the subject is not only good humoured but also practical. He takes when can be for many people an intractable subject and presents it in a way that whilst it is both witty and  educational, is more importantly a user-friendly, allowing access to the subject in such a way as to make it to be a genuine 'consolation' in our 21st century world. 

And so the task of working with very dark coloured oil paints, Prussian Blue in this case, on a Near-Black  ground begins in earnest!

Now that the near-black ground has dried on this painting I am able to begin building the colour structure onto this foundation. I have decided to continue along with the notion of treating this piece like a reverse watercolour in that starting from my near-black  I will proceed to build up colour in oils traveling from darkest to lightest. But first I need to sketch it out, charcoal on near-black, so only visible to the camera at this angle. 

This might not be perhaps the most interesting post to the casual observer but I'm excited about it. Today I have started for on, what I calling for now, 'Perturbations II: Casting Shadows Within the Void.'; I love the first version of this painting  (below) but I really want to take this idea of 'just painting the void (the sublime)' to another level.  In the first version of this piece I worked just with yellow ochre oil paint over a black acrylic ground, which did work really well, but I was a little frustrated by both the fact that it used the black acrylic ground and the lack of potential colour in the piece.

This piece is intended to rectify both of those problems first by creating a 'positive' ground of my traditional 'near black' oil paint to begin with; the whole canvas being grounded with this in place of the black acrylic ground. thus allowing me to paint the void leaving the 'perturbations' in near black. oil I will also bring more tones and colours into  the painting of the void,  with the intention of hopefully giving it even more infinite depth. 

As I consider the void in my paintings I have been drawn to reflect how other artists have approached the same  subject 'matter'; the work of the 15th century Zen Buddhist monk and artist Sesshū Tōyō displays an early  concern with the principles of the void. Of course Tōyō's 'concerns'  have very differing origins from my own, his being rooted in the spirituality of his Zen Buddhist beliefs, however there are enough similarities to make his work of relevant to my research. My primary interests within this area are questions surrounding the technicalities of how an artist depicts the void via their medium. and how that may then influence thinking around the subject.

Tōyō, as an artist  working within the traditions of Japanese calligraphy, is in essence a watercolourist, meaning that his medium, translucent pigment on a white ground, by it's nature controls the fact that he must always work from light to dark. When one considers the void as a subject in relation to this process one must concede that an artist working in such a medium doesn't actually 'paint the void'; the void is the negative space left behind, which can only exist because of it's relationship to the positive forms which the artist creates to inhabit the void.  

The work which I am currently using to explore this area is being produced by a painting technique which is in many ways a polar opposite of watercolour, in that I am working with opaque oils paint over a black background. The consequence of this technique being that I can, if I chose, paint only the void leaving the objects which define it as my negative shapes, thus raising the question of what is positive and what negative?