King’s Pool

This technique is very much  ‘wet on wet’. I didn’t wait for the solvent to evaporate, I just placed the final colour directly onto the under colour and allowed a certain amount of mixing to take place. The solvent content of the paint mixes was what produced the ‘wetness’, not extra medium. The paint manufacturers recommend not using too much medium for various reasons, most of them to do with the physical long term effects.

I often wonder about what they mean by ‘long term’. One year, 10, 100? Should we worry about this. For some bizarre reason I do. I mention this in the context of the ‘long term’ effects on the works of leading artists like Damien Hirst. The ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living‘ was a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine?? Will this be like the ‘great fish’ in Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea? When all the hype dies down, will there be only a skeleton left for us to view?

Here is the video of the above painting. Its short, only 5 minutes, as the painting was painted in about 1 hour.