Euphoria

So what is this?

Euphoria is a large sized grey and yellow abstract painting with accents of black and white. It’s a bold artwork and one that will no doubt own the space in which it is hung.

But hey, that’s a great thing. It means that wherever this eventually hangs it will add light, sunshine and a little bit of drama. I’m not sure I could ask anymore from a painting than that.

Yellow and grey

These are two very underutilised colours in my opinion. I have attempted paintings with these primary colours before and had some successes and some failures. I don’t mind admitting that because it proves that things have to feel right in order to put your name behind them.

It is the practice of practising that reaps rewards and often it’s the things that don’t go right that are the precursors to the things that do.

And in Euphoria, as the name would suggest, things went VERY right indeed.

How it was created

After the canvas was cut from the roll I applied a wash coat. This is a very thin layer of thinned paint that evens out the coarseness of the canvas weave.

Once that is dry (2 days) I apply the base layer which, in this painting, is the mix of grey and white you can see. That was done using a window squeegee and a small plastic grout spreader. Once I was happy with the base I left it to cure for around 2 hours (rather than days).

This was because of creating the yellow starburst shape. In order for that to feel like it’s part of the whole painting I needed to have it blend in with the white and grey base  – not too much though but just enough for it to feel connected to it.

The bonus of this 2 hour window of curing is that the base layer can still move so I get a double blending reaction between both top and bottom layers. They are technically separate but visually joined. Neat!

I finished the whole thing off with a couple of black and white squiggles (I don’t know what to call them?) which balanced the whole thing out perfectly.