orange gradient no. 9 - imojjen

they accepted one of my paintings for the blacktown city art exhibition this year (though they did reject the one just below - the word became flesh). anyway, this is the painting in the gallery, and a shot of the painting with my model for the image. they even chose to reproduce my painting in the catalogue, which i'm very excited about. i put a price tag on it which i hoped meant that no-one would buy it, as it is a painting of my daughter which i wouldn't mind keeping, but deep down i think it would be nice if someone bought it. i can always paint another portrait of imojjen.




the painting itself was done on a recycled canvas. i like using canvases that students have already worked on and then decided they don't want anymore, as there are built in texture layers ready to go. anyway, this particular one came complete with a nice big tear, so i stuck a new patch of canvas on it to cover it (you can see it sort of top left of the painting). the image comes from a photo bec took in january, which i manipulated in photoshop to get down to 4 or 5 shades. i then painted this onto the canvas. i started by using a projector, which almost helped for the main, basic outline, but proved pretty useless overall, meaning that all the different tones, inspite of appearances, had to be copied the old fashioned way - by looking and drawing.

the word became flesh

a piece of recycled board had some orange, red and cream paint applied, then layers upon layer of text written in mostly chalk pastels. this was built up for a while, focusing on composing the colour areas. then the white was added using liquid paper. all the text is the title repeated over and over.

the top image is the whole work. the lower two are close up sections.

this work was specifically created for the blactown art show, 2009.

collage, acrylic, chalk pastel, liquid paper, pva glue on chipboard.
103x90cm
august/september 2009
$300