THE SELF-ISOLATION RESIDENCY 29TH JULY 2020: DAY 122

New Painting, "Yellow Ochre on Near Black", oil & resin
on plywood block.

"Yellow Ochre on Near Black" is the third new painting in the 'Near Black series' painted on plywood blocks. This branch of the series successfully fuses my expressions of painting and art with my research into colour theory and the objecthood of a painting whilst also referencing my love of landscape as an expanded field.

Once again this is a two stage painting which began life as a very similar painting to "Near Black Mirror"; elements of the Near Black layers are still visible through the 'breaks' in the upper layers of paint. For the longest time I agonised about how to advance this painting; both of the previous paintings in the series were created in an objective way, that is the colour combinations followed rules that were beyond my control. However as I progressed with this piece the only way forward appeared to be in a subjective way, that was for me to make specific controlling decisions about subsequent colour mixes. This was not something that I wanted to do at this stage in the series; I really thought that there must be at least one more objective step to be tried before I allowed my own subjectivity to take over. And of course there was  in fact there are 2, but that's another painting. In many ways working with oil paint save paintings when an artist works in these kinds of processes, the prolonged drying time required to work with oils also allows for an extended thinking time, therefore eliminating any potential errors which may occur due to hasty decision making. During the drying time allowed for the first layers of this painting I have been able to consider what the final steps towards its completion should be. 'Near Black' is of course created by mixing Prussian Blue with Alizarin Crimson to create the darkest of purples, however using these to hues in this way does open the the question to how should the third hue in my 'Zornist' palette, Yellow Ochre, be used?

In "First Grey Near Black" the Yellow Ochre is used to temper the Near Black to First Grey,  which I found to be an elegant solution to that particular painting. What I needed here was an equally elegant and indeed simple solution to complete this painting. And indeed in the final analysis it was that simple, The Blue and Red components of my palette had already been used to create Near Black, which meant that the final layers of this painting could only be rendered by using pure Yellow Ochre to both balance the palette symmetry whilst also finalising the colour and tonal harmonies which the painting required. For me this has perhaps completed the first phase of this series.