“Painting onto vinyl. Yes, that’s what I’m doing.” She utters inwardly, in relief!
Something about the middle of the year sends me for a bit of a tailspin in my practice. I’m not sure if it’s just a coincidence or something else. But at the middle or briefly after the middle of the year, I am in struggle town – that’s the way it has been for the past few years. This year, I think it’s because I have been deconstructing what I do, peeling back layers and layers and questioning everything, reducing reducing… That’s all reportedly what you do in an Honours year. Huzzah. I am having a great time learning so much here, but I am also rebuilding. Perhaps only just days ago turning the corner and starting to build instead of continuing the deconstruction of my ideas and marks and ways of working. So many metaphors. So so many metaphors. Perhaps with a dash of ‘hang in there kitty’.
I’ve started working with a type of paint which has highly flexible properties and great adhesion to the surface of vinyl. I have been trying and trying to come up with ways I can wrap paintings around corners and onto floors and fixtures that I can’t paint on; like wooden floor boards, can’t paint temporarily on floorboards; glass, can’t paint on that either. But in working this way, there are some great advantages, one of which being that I can mix colours again, instead of having to know my colour palette completely in advance. The paint is gloss, which adds a new dimension and as well as that, painting on impenetrable vinyl means the paint sits on the surface, instead of being drawn into the surface of the wall, as when I paint onto plaster walls. It always pulled the paint in and flattened out my marks.
This does change the way I work somewhat, but I’m fine with it. It means that I roll out the vinyl, paint on it (on the floor to prevent runs), cut it out and then take it into the site to experiment. To date I have been treating each brush stroke separately. I paint them as individual strokes, then when they dry, I layer them together. I feel like this is a really three dimensional way of thinking about painting.
Time will tell where this leads. I have some wonderful fluorescent pink paint that I’m working with. It’s very transparent and needs a white background to work properly. The pic above shows some where I have painted onto clear, and I left the backing strip on, as it was too transparent and couldn’t be seen very well on the wood.
