Gerzoo Coffee found me on Google a few short weeks ago and decided to mail me and find out if I could help transform their popular and very big coffee house near Brighton. Of course I jumped at the chance! Okay so this wasn’t the easiest or most straightforward of jobs – the stairwell posed particular problems in terms of size, shape and what to paint onto them. Click to read more… The commission was an interesting one though as it gave me the opportunity to really mix up some styles and sizes and put them together. This is the most challenging so far in terms of it’s colour scheme – the coffee shop boasting strong orange, brown, yellow and red walls. It was always going to be more difficult introducing the right blends of colour into such a dominant environment.
I’ve mixed a lot of different colours to achieve a good cross section of tones that really fir well into the spaces. Overall I painted seven large pieces and five smaller ones. I also shot a video of one of the largest piece being painted which you can see below:
The stairwell is a particular success I think. During the painting process I had originally made the three frames 88cm wide. I then went and used an unprimed 13oz canvas to cover them. Despite ample priming and some very tight stretching I saw the pieces begin to ripple and become brittle. Most of the paint had sunk through the surface and stuck to the frame underneath! Not good… So I stripped off the canvas and ceremoniously threw it in the bin, cut the frames down by hand to 60cm wide and re-made them, bought fresh Windsor & Newton pre-primed 11oz canvas and started all over again. What came out this time was something altogether different from what had been painted before. I decided to paint all three pieces together and bring a continuous pattern across all three.
Thanks goodness I used black on the orange walls otherwise you would probably never see the paintings at all. I’m having a rest for a few days, not even thinking about painting for a while. I think it’s good to walk away now and again. A week of downtime will allow me to get blog post done, do a few web updates and plan a few other things too (I may even cut the lawn if the weather stays dry!).
To see the whole series of pictures from this project please see my Corporate Commissions page.
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