Paul Talbot-Greaves
I love the contrasts of winter, especially the muted browns and oranges. These work well against clear blue skies, but also on bright snowy days against the blue shadows. The cool and warm arrangements, along with complementary colour contrasts, often make for some striking paintings. Because acrylic can be used in both transparent and opaque forms, it opens many opportunities to use it in a variety of ways. In this painting, I did no pre-drawing, instead I used blocks of colour to quickly mark in the relevant shapes in roughly the right places. I say roughly as I believe a painting shouldn’t be refined too soon. Instead, I prefer to use layers, allowing a build of brushmarks, shapes and textures to emerge, so this kind of beginning fits my approach well.
The second part of my painting process formed the colours, shapes and values of the scene. Once again, I allowed for a gradual process as my focus was not on the finished painting, but primarily the foundation of the values. The beauty of acrylic is that you can sculpt paintings two-dimensionally, adding a dark, then light, then further darks, find an edge, lose an edge and so on until the picture begins to take shape. Once the shapes had been established, I settled in to building the final realism into the painting.