Posts Tagged ‘geometric abstraction’
Orange to blue and back again
Drawing: Sixteen sets of diagonal stripes in rotation. Orange to blue and back again, multiple times.
Orange to Blue and Back Again, 2013, watercolour marker on paper, 9″ x 9″
If it looks like its folded down the centre line, that’s because it is.
ABCBA (sketch)
Something I am working on in my sketchbook. The sequence of colours follows the pattern ABCBA, where A = violet, B = orange and C = green.
ABCBABCBA, 2013, Permanent Marker on paper, 9″x9″
The orange is slightly towards red, the green is towards teal and the violet is towards lilac. With the greens and violets present the red/orange looks much redder than it would do if seen together with other colours or indeed against white. The photo is quite near to how it really looks.
Sixty Four Sets of Diagonal Stripes, in Rotation: Sienna, Violet and Blue
A descriptive title for this new painting would be Pattern: Sixty Four Sets of Eighteen Diagonal Stripes in Clockwise Rotation: Sienna, Violet, Blue…
Sienna Violet Blue, Acrylic on Board, 9″x9″
…or just Sienna Violet Blue for short
It’s tiny, almost a miniature at 9″ x 9″ and not quite finished as I have yet to erase the pencil lines.
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.
Duke Street Tetractys
I had the idea for this tetractys when I was working at Wallacespace on Duke Street, St Pancras
Duke Street Tetractys 2, 2012, Acrylic and Permanent Marker on Board, 11 1/4″ x 11 1/4″
I was clearing away the marker pens after the day’s work when I noted this sequence of colours: yellow + blue = green, complementary = red, adjacent to orange made by adding yellow, complementary = purple. I made a sketch that same day and then during the next few days completed a version in acrylic and marker pen on acrylic paper, currently on display at First Come First Served at The Lion and Lamb Gallery. More recently I painted the version shown above, on board using narrower lines (possibly too narrow).
(The photo has a slight red cast due to the direct sunlight. My fairly good camera has a limitation of having automatic white balance only.)
Orange Rhombus
Orange Rhombus. Oct 2012, Acrylic on Canvas (four stretchers combined), 10″x10″
10 Rotations Within 20
You can probably guess where this is going…
…and before you ask, yes, I know they look like spirograph!
