Palette Cleansers #58 and #59

 

It occurred to me the other day that artists can be very stubborn in their ways, in particular when it comes to paint selection. I used alizarin crimson up until the beginning of 2020 when I finally jettisoned the paint in favour of some more lightfast red paints. The process started in 2017 when I bought quinacridone red, but I still used the trusty old alizarin for another 3 years before finally giving it up. My point is that artists get used to certain materials and techniques and change slowly, or not at all. That got me to thinking about improvement. To improve one needs to try something different, then get some feedback, either from others, or yourself. In the past year I have improved for sure, largely due to an influx of knowledge mostly from MacEvoy's Handprint.com and a few other sources, and a total revamp of my paint selection. With each painting I do, it seems to bring about steady growth. On the other hand, there are the palette cleanser's, where I basically clean my brushes and doodle! In this case, I used acid free sketch paper. Sometimes the simplest approach is the best one.

Palette Cleanser #58, 9 x 12" sketch book, watercolour, February 2021

 

I have a frame on the wall to show Japanese prints out of my copy of Hiroshige's 100 famous views of Eto. One of them depicts a swooping eagle over a frozen landscape. Maybe that was in my consciousness when I did this painting. When I started, I was actually thinking about the snow-glider parachutes that I had painted earlier on Saturday, you can sort of see that in the shape of the bird creature's body. Then it morphed into an eagle, or if you knew something about the Starcraft computer game, you would recognize a mutalisk. At any rate, it is another strange and beautiful painting from the imagination. There was only one more piece of paper left in my Fabriano paper pad that I had been using for the palette cleanser series, which I used to produce the final one of the series (#60). I will post it on Monday or so, it's going to be another busy week.

Palette Cleanser #59, 9 x 12" watercolour paper, watercolour, February 2021 (No.2526a)