messy paint
My lovely boyfriend who cooked me delicious soup and is now reading what I type over my shoulder is making this difficult, as is the time (almost 1 am) so I may keep this short and sweet tonight.
I spent about two hours tonight preparing calico to paint on. I wouldn’t exactly call it “priming” as the process was much less time efficient, much crazier and will probably not actually make the surface easier to paint on.
It was all because of my painting teacher’s response to my interest in Tracey Emin “Tracey Emin’s working style is really messy. You can’t try to be like an artist. If you do, you’ll always be derivative. They’ll always be better than you. You have to take what you like about their work and make it your own. If you take what you like from the artist’s work, but no one can guess you like them then you’re successful. Tracey Emin is messy. You should be messy. Get in there. I want you to do this big. Really big. Two metres. Just get two metres of calico. Get a bucket . Fill the bucket with black paint. Something cheap, it doesn’t matter what quality. maybe black food dye. Just gets lots. Bucketloads. Put the calico in the bucket. Paint on it. So that’s it. Calico, bucket, black paint, messy. ”
So that’s what I did. Only I didn’t have black food dye. I didn’t have much black of anything. I tried to explain what I wanted to the people at Dean’s art, but they got all condescending and bitchy on me and told me that “black fabric paint was the only thing that would work” and that I’d have to get it from their gertrude street shop. They seemed pretty affronted when I just bought half a litre of black poster paint from the children’s section. I didn’t have a bucket either. And it’d decided that I wanted a deep, bluey black, so I mixed in the acrylic with red, navy and black oils, linseed oil and turps. Which meant that I needed something durable (for when the turps ate through it.) We didn’t have any Tupperware containers either. So I put a plastic bag in a plastic bag, in a plastic bag in a plastic bag.
It came out amazingly, the oils are of course much more vibrant than the poster paint and show up in strong splodges of dark blue and black (the red being a much lighter hues doesn’t show through) and the whole effect is this sort of grungy black tie-die.
Point: my hands are still blue, and it took me ages to wash the laundry sink after I tried to rinse the calico in there. And those are good things. I love the mess. It gives art this real, tactile, cathartic feeling. I love dripping black paint around the house and throwing page after page of now-black newspaper in the recycling.
I could do this.
I spent about two hours tonight preparing calico to paint on. I wouldn’t exactly call it “priming” as the process was much less time efficient, much crazier and will probably not actually make the surface easier to paint on.
It was all because of my painting teacher’s response to my interest in Tracey Emin “Tracey Emin’s working style is really messy. You can’t try to be like an artist. If you do, you’ll always be derivative. They’ll always be better than you. You have to take what you like about their work and make it your own. If you take what you like from the artist’s work, but no one can guess you like them then you’re successful. Tracey Emin is messy. You should be messy. Get in there. I want you to do this big. Really big. Two metres. Just get two metres of calico. Get a bucket . Fill the bucket with black paint. Something cheap, it doesn’t matter what quality. maybe black food dye. Just gets lots. Bucketloads. Put the calico in the bucket. Paint on it. So that’s it. Calico, bucket, black paint, messy. ”
So that’s what I did. Only I didn’t have black food dye. I didn’t have much black of anything. I tried to explain what I wanted to the people at Dean’s art, but they got all condescending and bitchy on me and told me that “black fabric paint was the only thing that would work” and that I’d have to get it from their gertrude street shop. They seemed pretty affronted when I just bought half a litre of black poster paint from the children’s section. I didn’t have a bucket either. And it’d decided that I wanted a deep, bluey black, so I mixed in the acrylic with red, navy and black oils, linseed oil and turps. Which meant that I needed something durable (for when the turps ate through it.) We didn’t have any Tupperware containers either. So I put a plastic bag in a plastic bag, in a plastic bag in a plastic bag.
It came out amazingly, the oils are of course much more vibrant than the poster paint and show up in strong splodges of dark blue and black (the red being a much lighter hues doesn’t show through) and the whole effect is this sort of grungy black tie-die.
Point: my hands are still blue, and it took me ages to wash the laundry sink after I tried to rinse the calico in there. And those are good things. I love the mess. It gives art this real, tactile, cathartic feeling. I love dripping black paint around the house and throwing page after page of now-black newspaper in the recycling.
I could do this.