When you develop a new technique it always begins with a concept and practice. Add this to something like the sun for the composition, a palette of colour that spans purple, blue, yellow, aqua, turquoise, lime and gold and a near-obsessive attention to detail and what comes out is something that has surpassed my wildest expectations. I’ve been developing this new technique for over 18 months and now I am finally perfecting it on a big scale – with bigger ones planned.
There are so many individual elements to Coronal Mass that I cannot possibly talk about them all here, but the layering of paints on top of one another and the graduated way I have pulled them back from the edges and placed them between each other is the main reason why this art works so well – balance. With circles it’s easy to weight a painting to one side; for me that’s lazy. You don’t pay for an original just to get half a painting right? I wanted to fill every inch of the canvas with some kind of action, always careful about how that would react to other applications and colours around it. The sun is always moving and changing so I felt it important to do the same here.
There are a lot of cool photos in the sliders on this page because I took so many great shots from different angles. There are so many viewpoints to look at this painting that perhaps they may never all be realised. Rest assured that this will keep on giving for a lifetime. As time and perspectives change so will the painting.
Whatever you may define it as it is certainly an attention grabber; bright and vibrant, colourful and bursting with energy. And with the quality of the materials I use and the time taken to paint it you end up with something a bit special.
The early stage of my process uses a centrifuge to create some of the basic line structures using a very thinned out version of my enamel paint. All but the faintest traces of this disappear off the edge so what’s left is just enough for me to begin painting onto. I have to thin my paints to around 11% of their specific density so that the forces of gravity can pull the paint to the edges of the canvas. Unfortunately not much is left over once this is done.
Using these template lines as a guide I then sit down and begin to inlay all the painted layers, one syringe and one needle at a time, working on a small section before moving onto the next. Allowing for curing these circular paintings take around three months to create, such are the number of sessions required to build up the layering and colours. So the use of centrifugal force is only a small part of the creative process and as such it shouldn’t be really defined as spin art, although many people do. Fortunately, you now know otherwise…
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