Dead Daffs - Mixed Media

Go large to see the texture.

As a child I loved to sketch and paint and that was great for my old-school art teacher who I shall call Mr. Joyless for the purpose of this blip. Now I (and my classmates) were under the impression that art should be...shall we say...fun? Mr. Joyless appeared, to me and my mate Richard at least, to labour under quite the opposite impression. His mission in life as far as I could tell was to suck any love we had for art out of our souls...like some kind of anti-art dementor. I wouldn't have minded but I was a pretty damn reasonable artist and he managed to suck the joy out of it for me, so what it was like for those less artistically inclined (like my brother) I can only imagine.

Anyway, I had the good fortune to have a piano teacher whose husband was an eccentric, enthusiastic art-lover, as well as being a music teacher himself. While I was waiting for my brother to finish his lesson Barry would flit in and out of the small sitting room where we waited and expound on all manner of issues. When he realised I liked art he recommended (and lent me) books to read and artists I might enjoy - well, he didn't lend me the artists but you get the idea.

Through him I discovered the Impressionists; The Blue Riders; and the Pop Art movement. I was particularly taken with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who employed mixed media to great effect. I never really got the chance to indulge in such activities at school, then uni and life and family kind of got in the way but now, well...what I do is my own business isn't it?

I remember seeing a collage by Bob Kilvert called The Black Hat, which blew me away, and I had a go at creating my own a self-portrait collage a while ago.

I've also had fun creating textures for a while and today I wanted to create something quite painterly.

The daffs I was about to throw out gave me the opportunity. I shot them twice on my favourite blue background (I totally pinched the blue idea from Kandinsky, Macke et al of course), using a tripod: through a fine gauze and then with the gauze removed, and combined them in layers with a canvas / paint texture. Using layer masks I revealed and unrevealed little bits of of each layer until I had what I was looking for :-)