Saturday, June 10, 2017

Sad Reflection

‘Moff I’ 18”x12” Oil on Canvas
Unfortunately looking back on things that I did in the past isn’t always a happy artistic experience.

An example being this painting I did of my fellow art student and former housemate Mark Moffat. I made it at the very end of 1987 (I think). I liked it then, and I still do - it has the super “high-key” chroma that I preferred back then. However, we were not encouraged to use quality materials by our teaching staff, as “It’s only student work”, and it has suffered badly over the years.

The issue here is the mix of latex emulsion paint and white PVA glue that was recommended as a primer. The ingredients were really cheap and readily available (this was before acrylic gesso was available widely), but also unstably prone to cracking. There are some really bad cracks in this painting. I imagine that glueing it down to a panel could fix most of them - but I think I will likely leave it alone as a memorial to those times.

Anyway, I erased the cracks in Photoshop as an exercise (and to spare the blushes), so the photo is back to what it was when I was in college.