A
lot of people have asked me how I paint. You will notice that
A lot of my
paintings are acryl,
and only a few are in oil. That is
because I dislike the smell of terpentine, and I also like if my colors
dry rather quickly, so that I can put another layer of paint on top.
Usually
I start painting the outine of the scene. I have an idea of the
finished
painting in my head when I start, and I rarely do scetches beforehand.
Then, I usually paint
the sky
in detail, and the rest of the picture as a rough scetch, but so that
every
white spot on the canvas is gone. Only then do I start to fill in
details
of landscape or whatever, iterating myself to the finished painting.
Most of my acryl
painings have
a paper background, the smaller ones mostly some kind of oil/acryl
painting
paper. A lot of the larger ones (several of them having 53.5 cm as one
of the dimensions) are on the back of wallpaper, which was at that time
a cheap way to paint larger paintings. A few are on the front of
wallpaper,
using the structure of the walpaper as part of the picture. More
recently
I have started using real canvas as background.
The charcoal paintings are on some brown packaging paper or cardboard, - somehow I think that a brown background looks better for charcoal than a white one. Some red and white chalks are used for the colors other than black.
The
smaller pictures were scanned in directly, whereas the larger ones were
photographed with a digital camera. I tried to keep the file sizes of
the
images to a size where they load at a reasonable speed. I'm sorry for
the
resulting loss in image quality. Looking at the originals is something
else, anyway. I still own most of my artwork. I did give away a few
paintings
as gifts to friends, and I am also willing to sell my art to interested
buyers. (Please contact me if
you are interested.)
Some people
say that a lot of
my
art is dark and depressive. Maybe it is because I feel more
inspired to paint or write a poem, if I am in a thoughtful mood? Maybe
I leave some of my unhappiness in my art to become more happy? Maybe it
is just more interesting than sunny postcard-type scenes? - The
joy
of creating art is a wonderful experience. I encourage everybody who
wants
to try it to do so.
MIM