Dry Layered Mixing

Let's talk layers. During one of the gallery talks, Lyndy mentioned her admiration of Tom Thompson, one of the Canadian Group of Seven. He was quite the prolific painter, painting mostly outside in all forms of extreme weather. His life came to an untimely early end; so we are lucky to have so many of his work from his brief period of time painting. In the gallery, we pored over a book of his collected works, each page its own revelation. A few weeks later, a friend gave me a used book of Tom's work, and it sits on my coffee table, where I pick a painting to study most mornings over coffee. Each one is its own world of color, texture, and brushstroke. The more I look; the more I see. His work carries a colorful interior life, often the forms and shapes becoming silhouettes in the mid or foreground and the use of stroke or color bringing animation an vibrancy to the work. He worked a lot with underpaintings and letting the ground color underneath come through the painting above to make outlines and shapes creating edges that intersect with the upper layers of paint.

Inspired by Thompson, I had started embracing warm tones as ground in more recent paintings, and started to observe the nuance of the relative translucency of some colors over others. I am becoming fascinated how some colors when applied to the canvas acts as almost masks to the colors below, yet others can float above the pigment below and interact as if they were mixed on the palette, rather than being applied independently. Since I am working in Acrylics and not oils, the paint dries quickly and the ability to mix colors or blend on the canvas isn't always possible. However the translucent quality of some of the pigments creates a layered mixing technique, and I am tempted to put my brush down to analyze this further, But there is something to be said for immersing oneself in the making and learning as you go. The interaction of layers can build more depth in the shadows and range of variation in color blocks within the painting. A translucent leaning color applied thinly over underlying variation below can both unify and build up layered mystery within the work.

Some wonderful finds:

Veridian Green has a bluish tint, but is highly translucent. As it goes down initially it makes a thick green mark, but if you keep using the same brush, when applied over red, it becomes brown, even if the underlying color has dried.

Mixing Light Permanent Green and Light Aqua Green and then painting over these areas it also interacts with the color below, but less so.

Cadmium yellow mixed with light pink helps take of the edge of the yellow.

Pale Olive Green is a grey green mask.

Read more about Tom Thomson here:

https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/tom-thomson/style-and-technique/