This was the first of several paintings I did during “konst rundan” last month – I guess “someone” took a picture of me in the middle of it all .

Once again, sorry for the poor photography – beyond my obvious deficiencies as a photographer, flash on wet oil is not a good combination .

Open Mind

Playing with geometry.

Vertigo

Solviksvägen 27
Trelleborg

Öresund 1

This post is slightly out of chronological order as I did both of these two paintings before Moon & Son.

I guess the inspiration is fairly obvious.

I originally intended them to be closer in style and colour, but ended up doing #2 when the first one was in a different location and thus had no reference beyond memory (which is what it is, no comments necessary ).

Öresund 2

My wife persuaded me to try gold and silver oil paints, which was not really something I had planned to use.

Ever.

I must admit though, that it makes for a nice effect when you blend it with other colors. So much so that I used both extensively for Moon & Son.

Mr. Moon returns, this time with family…

Moon & Son

The broken staircase was an attempt to make a larger picture span several paintings, with the space in between the individual canvases hiding parts of it.

Rather than simply doing two paintings side-by-side, I actually drew a sketch on a very large piece of paper and then framed the sections I wanted to paint. I later used the sketch as a template when placing the pictures on the wall – obviously they need to be placed with some accuracy to get the desired effect.

Unfortunately, the photo did not turn out so well – I’m not a photographer, after all , but I guess you get the idea.

After finishing the archway twins, I wanted to try a slightly more complex motive, and went ahead with an odd-perspective alley with lots of potential to play with lights and shadows.

Alley Light

Alley Light started with a basic sketch directly on the canvas and evolved slowly, detail by detail – a mistake it took me a while to realize. In fact, I repeated it on at least the following two paintings.

It is not that the end result is necessarily worse because of it, but it makes it difficult to keep a sense of direction, and I at least ended up with a variation in detail and color that was maybe not entirely what I had planned.

Of course, sometimes that is a large part of the fascination with painting – seing a real world image emerge from what is merely a hazy idea.

The imaginatively named Archway 1 & 2 were my first attempts at painting on canvas, and let’s just say that I don’t think I’ll be painting on wood again anytime soon. Wood takes an incredible effort compared to canvas.

Archway 1

I stuck primarily to yellow ochre and burnt umber with white and black to tone it up and down so it is almost entirely up to lights and shadow, and the knife marks in the fat oil, to bring the painting to life. I mixed colors directly on the canvas and worked free hand with no sketches or pencil marks. What I learned from that was that the composition does gain from a bit of preparation, especially when working wet in wet.

Archway 2

It took two and a half years before I made my second attempt at oil painting, and while I was better prepared this time in terms of tools and oils, I followed much the same recipe as the Moon Man (Oil on plywood).

SkoogsBrand

A technique I used for this painting (mostly evident in the bottom half), and which I’ve come to use a lot, is rough mixing of colors directly on the canvas (or board in this case).

I place daps of the colours I wish to blend in dark and bright areas, and then use the #2 knife (almost square) which I press into the oil working from dark to light or light to dark depending on the tone I wish to achieve.

Because I press the knife into the oil rather than smearing it around, I end up with a rough and very lively texture, with both small areas of smooth gradients and areas of great contrast.

This was my fist experiment with oil. It was not even supposed to be a painting to begin with, I was preparing a frame which we were going to decorate with tapestry and hang on the wall to “break” an otherwise entirely white surface.

The Moon In The Man

I was wiping off the brush after painting the border black and suddenly saw this tall character with a black top hat emerge in front of me. I couldn’t help but finish the image, and just happened to have three tubes of oil paint lying around (Titanium White, Ivory Black and burnt sienna).

Since I wasn’t really prepared for this I only had the big brush I used for the border and the spartula I’d used to apply plaster over the holes in the board, and so began my preference for oil and the painters knife. (This painting is done directly on a framed piece of wood).

The end result is rather abstract, and while there’s a lot of things I would do differently today, this to me is still the “accident” that got it all started.