Tissue box - urban decay patina 2

 I went back to the box and shook it up a bit.  It’s finished when it leaves me in peace, it hadn’t done that yet.  Also, I wanted it to communicate more.  I used wax, nail hardener and Vaseline, as well as cling film and acetate.  All I’m interested in is conveying a sense of the passage of time, decay, being lost, abandonment, neglect etc etc.

After that I decided to record the ‘paint printing’ method in my sketchbook.  As I did this a strange thing happened...

The motorway

 I was driving really late last night and I had to stop along the route.  Less than half an hour later there was a collision in the road ahead of me.  If I had taken possibly two minutes less time in the break I took, I would undoubtedly have been directly affected by this accident.  To cut a long story shot, I watched the rubber-neckers gawp at the mangled vehicles and take macabre photos, but remained in my car.  When they managed to let the people through I could see what had happened, it was an extremely bad accident where clearly as a car was attempting to change lanes, the car in the next lane just drove into him and spun him round and crushed the car to smithereens.  The drivers were unhurt, but shaken up, I think they were young dope-heads, you know the sort..

Anyway as I drove along and looked forward to my nice warm bed, I encountered a truly magical sight.  A large group of deer were at the side of the road and just in the road, gently nibbling fresh green over- hanging shoots, without a care in the world.  I glimpsed the stag in amongst his harem of very sweet does.  

Then when I got up the next day, I decided to use the way I felt in my artworks...

I had made a weird stage prop grunge, inside-out tissue box to experiment with aged patina.  I wanted to make fake aged wood, you know the kind of things you see in derelict buildings.  (I adore urban decay images!)

(I’ll post all the pictures at the end because this thing bounces around a lot once I upload images.)

Then I was experimenting with mark-making and texture.  It was really hard to a achieve a particular mark I was after, but I’ll work out a quicker or better way to do that.  There a masses of YouTube videos about distressing for faux patina and cracked, flaked and peeling paint.  Personally peeling paint is the one I’m after, as it’s such an evocative communication shorthand for the passage of time...

I work fast, always have and the painting I did for my bedroom, incidentally, took under an hour to paint.  Thinking about it took a lot longer, but once I got down to it, my hands are basically catching up with my brain and my eyes are just the referee.  

Here goes, first off, a landscape using paint transfer from waxed paper...

Long time no see ppl all over the world!

 I finished the chair!  

Then I needed to do the painting for my Moroccan bedroom...but of course one thing led to another, and the painting turned out to be very different from anything I had planned up to that point and opened the door on a whole new chapter in my life.  Which is basically to pour all my brain activity into making paintings.  So here are all the photos, sorry but there is simply no more time to wax lyrical and navel gaze.  I need to get on...remember, all of life is a test and we need ask ourselves this? Do we think for a moment that we can either opt out or worse still, fail?  No way!