I've finished the first of my "formal" paintings adapted from the sketches and photographs I did on my tour through Pennsylvania and Maryland. I hope that this will be the start of a long series of landscape, architectural, and townscape art inspired by the American countryside. It's called "Cornfield's Edge," and it is acrylic on illustration board, 11" x 14".

Here's some information for the artists who might be looking at this Electron entry. "Cornfield's Edge" is painted in acrylic gouache, which is a recently developed form of acrylic paint that dries not only opaque but with a flat, non-shiny surface. Conventional acrylic paint is almost always somewhat transparent, and I have to build up colors with lots of layers. With acrylic gouache, a single coat will do, on which I then add other layers of color and details. The paint is rather thick, though it can be thinned with water, and does not blend easily on the painting's surface. It won't be opaque if I add too much water, though. It dries very quickly, except in humid weather. When it dries, it's waterproof. The non-reflective surface tends to be delicate, so I spray a matte fixative over it when the painting's done.

This acrylic gouache was originally developed for craft painting, on wooden, cardboard, or plaster items. When I first used it, I had problems with fading and yellowing as the paint aged. But the types available now are professional artists' quality, although they're still marketed to crafters as well. One of the nicest things about this paint is that because it is also craft paint, it is packaged in pre-blended colors, so that the non-professional crafters won't have to make a mess mixing colors. This makes my job a lot easier, too. They have blended beautiful, natural vegetation greens, fruity gold, misty distance blue, sandy beige, weathered wood brown, and warm white. There are plenty of bright spectrum colors, too, in case I want to paint pictures of flowers, or Trader Joe tomato signs.

There are quite a number of brands of acrylic gouache now, from many different countries. My favorite for pre-mixed colors is Jo Sonya's Artist Colors which are made in, of all places, Australia. These are marketed as craft paints but I have found that they are as good as any professional paint. My other mainstay of this type is Polycolor acrylics which are made in Italy. (Site is in Italian.) These do not come pre-mixed, but in brilliant pure colors, and they are expensive. The top of the line in the acrylic gouache department are Golden Matte Fluid Acrylics but they are very expensive. A new, and less costly, entry in the field is Turner Acryl Gouache, from Japan, which features some exquisite pre-mixed colors, as well as unusual textures. This is probably more than you would ever want to know about acrylic paint.

I wondered whether painting these landscapes would be a diversion from the more "serious" geometric and space abstractions I've been producing. But I don't have to worry about losing my "edge." It turns out that the countryside has its own geometry, with interesting intersections of angles and forms made with planted fields of vegetation, buildings, and dirt rather than mathematical graphs.

Posted at 3:27 am | link