How A Demonstration Painting Turned Out from Plein Air in Park Place Day

Posted on by

On May 20, 2017, I participated in the Pop-up Plein-air Painting in Park Place Pawtucket event. In the afternoon I performed a painting demonstration to a small group of interested people who gathered to watch how one of my “Abstracted Rainy Moments” paintings came to life. I’ve chronicled the process here.

Here‘s how the painting has changed from beginning to end…
The demo painting started out as a bunch of very thick daubs and dots of oil paintingapplied generously in a pointilist style.
After fully smearing generously with stand oil and brush, this is what the paintinglooked like about one hour after the initial demonstration, just before I was about to pack it up to bring back to the studio.
The above two photos show what it looked like a little later that same night. Because a lot of the paint was still very thick and was not smearing as easily as it usually does, I added another layer of stand oil at the top, and let it drip down.
After adding the additional stand oil and letting it drip, I used a fan brush and medium flat brush to feather out and blend up and down to bring out and highlight some of the colors that previously were hidden by the first round of drips. This photo below shows what it looked like after some of of that blending.
After letting it drip more and then getting distracted for a day or so, the top layer of the painting finally starting forming a skin, and thereby the drips stopping and the top layer beginning to dry.

One of the things about this process is that not every painting always turns out exactly perfectly the way I hoped or planned it would…including this one.

The night after the pop-up plein-air demonstration, I ended up being so drained that night that I didn’t touch up the drips as much as I should have. Then on Sunday, we ended up having a cookout that demanded much more work on my part than I had anticipated, and therefore I wasn’t able to quite revisit the surface of the painting as planned. The texture of this particular painting ended up being a lot rougher than the smooth, glossy surface that I achieved in my other paintings.

Now I am going to more carefully plan out and block out any scheduling in the first 48 hours of an Abstracted Rainy Moment painting that would keep me from giving it the intense focus that it needs to achieve the surface I hope aim to achieve.