I’ve been thinking a lot about stylization as I do more gouache painting, and particularly trying to find a way to integrate a lot of the “happy accidents” you get from brushes, water, paint and substrate all messing with each other into my larger visual goals. Doing this on paper can be really fun — I love seeing how wet in wet techniques affect gouache, and cotton and cellulose paper have very different properties and can get very different results — but paper overall is a resilient medium for gouache, one where I know how to pull a painting back from the brink and then render it into tight oblivion whenever I want.
So I did this experiment on an 8 x 8″ unprimed wood panel, a gouache substrate I have also really enjoyed in the past, and I was reminded of all the amazing things that gouache can do on an unfinished surface! And then I tried, I really did try, to resist rendering it fully into oblivion, and I really am proud of the result up there! There are some really fun abstract shapes in there, and I love the brush marks and bursts of texture in the ruin and the tree!
But I did take a photo earlier on in the painting’s process, and I have to be honest, friends, it haunts me:
There’s a lot of it that feels very unfinished — the dragon is a mess still, and a lot of the brushstrokes feel chaotic and meaningless, especially in the white sky — but there’s somethin about the softness of the ruin and the tree that I wish, I desperately wish I knew how to do on purpose.
So I think my next personal quest will be to figure out how to do these soft areas on purpose — and how to simplify the paint I surround them with to feel less overworked and more simple, while keeping it cleaner and more intentional than my WIP dragon currently is.
I’m excited to push farther with this approach! I’ve primed a couple panels with different substrates – transparent watercolour ground, opaque watercolour ground, pastel ground — and we’ll see what media works well where to get me this kind of approach.
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