February 8, 2016

Something a little different today. On December 31, my kids and I visited the Art Gallery of Alberta. One of the exhibitions was of the work of Chris Cran – my current favourite Alberta artist. After seeing some of his work with paintings of half-toned images, I thought I’d play a little. This is more of an experiment to see how the technique would work in preparation to play with these ideas more in future pieces.

I started by painting the surface of a 6″ X 6″ canvas with flourescent pink acrylic paint and the edges with black gesso. Then I taped stripes onto the surface and covered it with a layer of acrylic gloss medium.

I proceeded to paint a half-toned image over the tape in oil paint. While the paint was still wet, I removed the tape.

One of the questions that this experiment poses is, how much of an image do we have to have available to us in order to understand what we’re seeing? There is a lot of room for improvement with this. One of the biggest problems here is that my scale is all wrong. But it’s the first one. I will continue to play with this idea for a bit and see what I can come up with.