Painting on Board

Painting on board is new behaviour for me, I usually prefer stretched canvas. The tetractys series I am working on seems to demand a hard surface with more resistance, making it easier to achieve a crisp(er) line.

London Tetractys, Dec 2012, Acrylic and Permanent Marker on Board, 11 1/4″ x 11 1/4″

They’re small, only a few inches bigger than the drawings on paper that initiated the series. Whereas the drawings were 8″ x 8″ the paintings are 11 1/4″ x 11 1/4″. I like the non-standard size, the result of paying attention to the measurement of the central diagonals rather than the vertical/horizontal frame. From corner to corner diagonally these small paintings measure 16″.

The process of laying down, or building up, the white ground on which to paint the lines, is slow and repetitive, employing many layers of white acrylic paint before even beginning to draw the network of black lines. I am experimenting with the width of the lines, in this one they are roughly a 16th of an inch which works better than the previous painting where they were narrower. Also the length of the lines that make up the coloured asterisk-like figures (or gaps that make up the Ehrenstein figures) is a variable I am playing with. In this painting they are 1cm long, larger in scale than in the drawings but probably not quite large enough. I don’t know why I dislike the fact that I am using inches for some measurements and centimetres for others and I will change that in future.

I am enjoying the indirection of these images – that whilst there are no directly drawn circles here, it is circles we are seeing.

I also like the near repetition of certain colours, two oranges (slightly different oranges), two reds (slightly different) two greens (slightly different) and one yellow. They are based on the limited colours I had available when completing the drawing in my hotel room on a recent London trip.

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