Line of Sight

Black, white and beautiful

This black and white abstract art work, even by my own admission, is something special. It is marked out as such for a host of different reasons but most notably is the one regarding the technical breakthroughs with chemicals.

Now, let’s not take away from the painting here or forget that creativeness and imagination can not be substituted for a process driven mindset. The painting does have some very cool and pretty amazing effects (borne from the addition of a new chemical additive) but these cannot hold a work of art on their own.

I was not reliant on adding special products to make this stand out – instead what they have done is add a new dimension to an already pretty encouraging painting and this, in turn, has lifted it into that most rarest of places – for me anyway it’s the place where the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. When that happens I know I’ve struck gold.

 What did I add then?

Well, I will be keeping the name of the chemical a secret but I can tell you it has some repellent properties. What this means, in practical terms, is that the paint is forced away from the points where the chemical sits (in a large enough quantity to act against it).

This produces little canyons and craters of paint which I have tried to capture on the photos (please do have a scroll through and se for yourself).

Over and above that, where the quantities of the repellent chemical are NOT sufficient to move the paint I have had a couple of different reactions. One is the delicate blooming of the black paint dots that you can see around the edges and the other is the strange smokey waves that radiate through the middle.

I haven’t seen either of these effects before in any painting I have ever done and I have tried to recreate them since (with the same paints and chemicals) and can get nowhere near it.