Latest painting, May 2020 - Untitled
Untitled – [Red stripe with white and pale yellow pastel layers].
I have just completed this painting, it went on hold during lockdown and so the latest layers went on this week.
I have been trying to articulate how some of the transparencies I created on the ply box would translate onto canvas variations. The canvases I order are primed with a white primer, I don’t use rabbit skin glue because I refuse to be involved in animal cruelty as a consumer. So until I find an alternative, this gives me some limitations on how I use the paint when I translate it to canvas. There needs to be an addition of a colour to give the white transparencies something to show up against. The layers in this painting are extremely delicate and hard to photograph to show correctly and the studio lighting is overhead so that makes this task harder.
Hence I have chosen a pastel yellow made from combining fluorescent yellow and white. It’s become an essential part of the painting, not just a layer to form the underlying structure, but also a divider between two layers of ‘leaves’ of transparencies.
There is a rhythm througb the layers from canvas to the upper layers, a sequencing. The layers move outwards / forwards from the base canvas layer through pastel yellow, then white then yellow, they are intersected by the almost three dimensional red line (which itself wraps around the canvas and onto the sides) and the layering of white continues on top of this to seal it in.
If this were expanded out three dimensionally as panels they would be delicate, soft sheets. You could imagine walking through hanging layers or planes of space.
Around the edge to the top right there is a red triangle ‘tag’ device that would link this painting to the next, it’s a feature that has come from the previous studies on ply and the box where the elements of the paintings touch together.
All images © Trudie Moore
Current themes: transparencies, opacities, paint edges, material performance, three dimensional planes, lightness and freshness of colour, purity and expansion to create space.
Trudie Moore 2020
Transparencies and subtleties in my latest painting.
I’m in the process of developing a bigger, three dimensional body of work that expands planes and dimensions within my paintings. Materials are important to me, as much as colour and so I am investigating how the two work together to ensure the surface has an importance in the piece.
A piece I completed around Christmas starts to move into a much more three dimensional space. I enjoy working with materials that have a character of their own which brings a deeper concentration to the planes within the work. Ply has proved to be not just an appealing material with the natural wood grain contrasting with the plasticity and synthetic surface and colour of the paint, but it’s also a good, resistant and smooth surface that gives clean edges and sharp lines and a smoother surface to the paint.
So this has opened up for me various avenues I am exploring, how ideas translate both onto canvas and ply (and other potential materials) and how the elements within the paint itself work with the surface.
In terms of the paint application, there’s an ability with acrylic to create super sheer, delicate layers that can increase and increase in density and be built up to an almost plastic layer which sits elevated on the surface
Untitled [Three dimensional box in ply] .
Amplifying the surface more extremely is an experiment I have been making. My deep frame canvases haven’t been deep enough to carry out the ideas I have been trying over the years and so this three dimensional box is the substantial iteration of that. From the smaller preceding ply studies there were planes of colour that were moving across. This is the next step on where the elements go around the sides and over the top – an element of wrapping the object as well as unfolding around it.
There is a stage on from this of exploring both ‘the material of the canvas’ and ‘the material of the paint’ as separate yet combined elements which constitute the painting.
All images © Trudie Moore
Supporting studies .
The studies below experiment with concepts in the pieces above, some are tests, some are works in their own right.
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Scaling up and expanding
Sometimes working on multiple small paintings at once leads to results that require a little expansion - to further explore something to see how it might work if the areas and proportions changed.
I've always enjoyed large scale paintings, my work generally lends itself to a more ambitious scale rather than being confined into smaller dimensions, but smaller works do help to create a volume of ideas and exploration.
This is how a few of my recent big canvases started out. I scaled this smaller piece up to a really big painting as I could see the capacity it had that would lend itself to a bigger expanse.
The detail of the ‘balance’ (the linking of elements), the semi-opaque white as a leading element to this piece, are favourite points for me.
I had to scale the piece from rectangular portrait dimensions to square and devise how the colours would work on a white primed canvas when the background wasn’t a neutral base of ply.
With painting onto the white primer there’s a need to cover the whole surface, unlike with the ply, which means all of the painted shapes become more as one, rather than benefiting from the natural way the ply becomes visually, and tangibly another plane.
With the ply it’s more obvious that the surface is separate and the paint sits on top of it. With a canvas this is less so the case. And then there’s an element of illusion in the two dimensional effect as well where just by adding a painted colour, it changes the planes.
Yellow and white abstract.
This painting is another large scale translation onto square canvas from one of the smaller studies on ply that I did.
The asymmetric composition and diagonal lines with linked elements are where I feel the flow with this, as well as the introduction on this larger piece of the red triangle 🔺 contrasting with the subtle green and white, yet linking across to the fluorescent yellow.
As with the other large painting that evolved this way, there were changed and adaptations I made to transfer to a white background (primes canvas) and the larger, square format.
Now having lived with it for some while, and having progressed other pieces I’m eager to add something, another element, that was never a part of the plan when I started.
So you could say that this piece has taken almost 2 years to do!
I once had a conversation about how I develop my paintings, do I plan them? The suggestion was that I could plot them up on on a computer before painting.
But despite the time to learn a way that suits me for this to work, I struggle with that as my brain works better by using the paint itself. And actually a lot of the time what I plan changes as I’m doing the painting.
I can lose the impact if I try to plan too much. Perhaps you could say it was a 2-way conversation with the painting where it starts to guide you. You could say this was an intuitive approach but I think it’s more of a collaborative process with each piece.
Or maybe I prefer to just enjoy the moment or the instant that something reveals itself to me. A bit like running. I hate to run out and back on the same path, the run back is too difficult or painful to endure, I like the constant change of the new all the time. To plan a painting and then paint it, I think kills the joy and the thrill/ tension in the moment of actually getting the idea direct to the painting.
But I do use a sketchbook so that I don’t lose ideas and thoughts when they hit me or when I want to work out how something is going to work.
And so with the development of paintings, I love nothing more than to work on several at once. If my mind goes off on a tangent with an idea I can do it on another painting instead of being solely tied into the one and then losing the idea by the time I’m done. And I can develop nuances I think of once I’ve started by running those thoughts and ideas across a group of paintings at once.
That’s what’s happening in this picture, several pieces in development at once feeding into one another, a neon hotbed of ideas!