Worlds Collide

About this work:

I created this work on a golden rectangle panel. I started experimenting with pour painting, which is a technique I haven’t explored since 2009, but Caitlin and I have some of the pour paintings I made then hanging in our house and lately I’ve been giving those a second look and I’ve been curious to see what I could do with pour painting now and how I could make it my own. For years my approach to painting has been to build color slowly through thin glazes. I developed my own “Awesome Sauce!” acrylic painting medium for that specific purpose, seeking a way to have the low viscosity, slow drying time, even leveling, and warm-butter like tactility of heavily thinned oil paint. Working with paint mixed with pouring medium is a very different experience: it has a much higher viscosity, it dries more quickly, and it requires that I use a lot more paint and medium too. I’ve seen pour painting artists online working with full gallons of acrylic paint, and I can see why! From years of working with hard-edge techniques, I knew paint with a high viscosity could be problematic: when I’m ready to remove the making tape, it could be so buried under the paint that it can’t be removed cleanly. In this work, the technical challenge was to see how I could marry pour painting and hard-edge painting techniques.