"Lavender Blues" (draft 1)

(image 1)

(Image 2)

This is the beginning of another piece so I do not have a quote yet. The technique involved consists of heavy body acrylic, white gesso, a brayer, and rubbing alcohol. This could be called "jazz painting" since the piece is being made up as I go along.

 For many years, "jazz writing" was a popular thing to do.....still is. It involves writing in a polyrhythmic fashion by exploring different spacing options and different sizes and weight of the letter thrown into the mix. Including in that type of writing now is a popular term called gestural writing. And it looks easy, but it really cannot be done well without an established foundation in italic or other script hands. So what I have begun in today's posting is my version of "jazz painting".

There are not many rules, but I have established a few just so I have a particular direction to the piece. The first principal of design I am adhering to is to create shapes. In the first image, I actually delivered paint to the surface (140 lb. HP) with a brayer. The color is Dioxazine Purple (Golden). I also sprayed alcohol into it so by the time I got through, there were darker and lighter areas of this color covering most of the quarter sheet of paper.   I also made some gestural marks into the paint with the corner of my credit card while it was still wet.  This dried overnight.

This morning, I added white gesso (full strength) to the areas you see in (image 1). The gesso was delivered to the paper with a credit card and then dried thoroughly with a hair dryer. And this leads me to my second rule which is to leave a portion of the previous layer in tact. Hence, you see a good portion of the original paper still showing.

The next step was to spray the white gesso areas with alcohol to break up the surface and create more texture by lifting the paint erratically with a lot of brayering. More alcohol and more brayering followed until I was satisfied with the texture. And I deliberatedly left a small portion of the white gesso untouched while rolling the brayer over a portion of the original dark purple area.

So in the final analysis, it is all about what to reveal or conceal. And that, to me, is the essence of "jazz painting" and is quite fun to do. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.