Exercise 2 – Overlaying Washes

Carrying on from the last exercise I have then taken the dried Violet and Ultramarine washes and have gone over with the opposite colour, painting in broad sweeping motions the paint went on reasonably well with more control than the first wash of colour. The colours didn’t seem to blend as well when painting over the dried wash but seemed to build a more intense colour. I also noticed that the paint doesn’t run as much as the wet on wet washes did. Overlaying the washes of paint can help to build a more intense colour and a sense of depth.

I have looked into the work of Mark Rothko who was part of an abstract expressionist movement of colour field painting. Which is characterised by the painting of a large area of one flat single colour. In his ‘Seagram Murals’ he created a series of paintings, the second and third involving different variations of a floating window frame. He experimented using more sombre colours and painted the following ‘Red on Maroon’ by using glue in the paint to create the ‘matt’ base to the background, then another coat of paint which he scraped some of away, followed by a red frame in which he used fast brush strokes and a decorators brush. Although at first glance the paintings appear slightly primitive and childlike, on further inspection your eyes get drawn into the rectangles of colour, are they hovering out of the frame or are you looking in at them? The use of colour has created depth and a strange illusion which holds the voyeur captive.