Graviton

Smart color choices

Graviton is a large, rectangular abstract painting featuring a myriad of twists and turns and a series of spectacular movements. It’s an unusual color palette for me as I chose this time around to concentrate on lime green and purple as the focus.

Woven into these rich and vibrant colors is a bright burst of orange as well as accents of turquoise and red. In fact it’s the orange that really brings out the other colors brilliantly. I have talked before about opposing colours and the role they play in creating drama and in this painting that principle is borne out perfectly.

A dab on one side and a swirling river on the other is all it needs for you to see how the lime and purple really pop. Opposites, like black against white, are such a clever tool in determining how a painting feels. They allow you to see both elements more clearly and provide contrast between each other.

How it was created

From the expanse of a freshly cut piece of canvas comes a technique that’s so elegantly simple and expressive I sometimes wonder why other artists don’t use it. It’s one tool – a flat piece of thin steel sandwiched between two pieces of wood to act as a handle. The movements are the key thing here as they determine what paint is moved and where.

Naturally there are a thousand tiny decisions to be made along the way and this is the artist brain and conscience at work – but the actual application and moving of paint is as simple and elegant as it can get. If you’d like to see exactly what this looks like then catch the live stream paint broadcast where it was created and you can watch it in all its glory!

And of course it’s created with my wonderful enamel paints which allow me to do some extraordinary things that other mediums simply can’t do. I can play with textures and gloss ratios directly from the can as well as many other techniques to help me achieve some unique finishes.