March 2018 – Simon Robert Tune

This entry follows on directly from my last entry at the end of 2017 where I had made a number of works plein air. Working outside can be tricky, you have to cope with the elements, the wind and the rain, your work often gets blow over, you drop things, stuff gets stuck to the painting’s surface (I have heard tell that Van Gogh in particular would have things such as sand and even a grasshopper stuck to his work). One of these problems I recently partly solved, was what to do with the left over paint on the pallet. If you are outside in a field, on a beach then left over paint is a real pain and whatever you are going to do it is going to make a mess or dry up or both. My solution was simply to create another painting from the left over paint. A first attempt at this was carried out on Aberystwyth beach at the end of 2017:

Leftover paint landscape number 1.

The crude painting here was far from amazing but I enjoyed the process, immediately a few things came to light: By this point in the painting process, i.e. after I have already been painting for a while on another work, the paint that is left is often of odd colours and dirty. Whether acrylic or oil the medium (water or oil or turps) is often also dirty and by the same logic you often have unclean brushes. The work needs to be done quickly because I am actually trying to pack away and I am often cold or wet or simply required else where. However, I have found that out of these quite limiting factors has come work that I am increasingly pleased with. One of my problems in painting is that I get too tight and precious over the work, to do a work that by its nature has to be the opposite of this has been really educational.

The works that followed on from this painting mostly related to my landscape generator project and so they are paintings of other alien landscapes found out in solar system. I further developed the method of working to actually utilise a single brush and dirty water, often mixing directly on the paintings surface and just applying more paint when I wanted one colour or another to dominate. This required an impasto painting technique of pushing the paint around the surface and often blocking different colours in a method similar to printing rather than painting (this was in an attempt to avoid colours over mixing and just becoming a muddy mess. To start with the paintings have actually been quite small about 6×4 inches (as that was what I had in wood off cuts), but I do envisage this becoming a future painting method that I could use to complete larger works.

I have really enjoyed the freedom that working this way has allowed and I particularly like the fact that now I no longer end up with one painting but two and sometimes even three paintings at the end of the day, which of course is very productive and helps me on my way to the prolific artistic level that I always have aspired to.