THE SELF-ISOLATION RESIDENCY 10TH JULY 2021: DAY 468

New painting: 'Perturbations: Casting Shadows Within the Void.'
Personal Topography Series, yellow ochre oil over black acrylic paint
on canvas, 407 x 610 mm, 2021. 

New painting: 'Perturbations: Casting Shadows Within the Void.' Personal Topography Series,
yellow ochre oil paint over black acrylic ground on canvas, 407 x 610 mm, 2021.
 
In some, perhaps, many ways this latest painting is the most palpable of my Personal Topographies to date. The painted space is very much a symbolic void, an internal void, which is disturbed or perturbed by ‘external influences’ which cast shadows throughout it. This is perhaps a metaphor for how I see the outside world disturbing the human inner psyche and leaving its impression on it.
The painting appears to be deceptively simple in both its image and its execution; monolithic structures loom insubstantially, their margins hazy and undefined. As shades within the void they do however appear to have enough substance of to cast shadows of their own, inferring how even the slightest intrusions can affect complex systems; the butterfly effect.
As for the image it is formed through what could be thought of as a type of mixed media; although I don’t use black pigments in my paintings, all my oils are painted over a black ground which eventually is subsumed by oil paint. ‘Perturbations’ has a similar origin in that I began with this same black ground, painting on it only with yellow ochre oil paint. In areas this paint is thick and dense, almost impasto, it blanks out the black ground below. In other areas the paint is applied via a dry brush technique which leaves it semi-transparent allowing the black below to ‘shine’ through creating tones of yellow, green, brown and greys, some of which in themselves approach black.
Technically I would say that the piece is really an oil painting, rather mixed media, as even though the oil paint is almost imperceptibly thin in places the whole canvas has been painted with it.  It could be said that the technique echoes watercolour painting where the ‘white’ of the paper illuminates the pigments or even a form of monochrome drawing.