I had one of those Eureka! moments on Monday. I’ve been doing a lot of printmaking and I’ve mentioned before how diverting into other areas of art making invariably informs painting progress somehow or other.
And so…I have always loved painting with large rollers. I’ve made various attempts over the years using decorators’ tools very successfully with household enamel but it’s limiting colour wise. I like the large random uncontrolled sweeps of wide brushes and tools and the serendipitous mixing of colours. I’ve tried countless ways of replicating this extreme leave-it-to-chance with oil paints but it’s not straightforward. Until printmaking provided the answer.
My Eureka! moment was the realisation that I could get soft printmaking rollers to work with oil paint. I could not wait to get into the studio today to try my thought experiment in practice.
It works. I need to think and reflect how and where I use it because the temptation is always to scattergun a new technique and overdo the effect etc etc. But this is a very exciting discovery.
