About ten years ago I was making art thinking of myself as a painter. I was trained with oil paints by an intense and dogmatic teacher who was fanatical about one way of putting paint on canvas. Figurative art with direct decisive paint strokes and faceted gradations of observed color were the laws of painting I was taught, along with how to build and stretch a canvas, maintain brushes and handle the paint, thinning media and other arcane chemicals.
In the last few days before I went home for the summer, having finished and packaged my canvases, I dug up some tubes of gouache in a materials closet that I should have been cleaning. When I brought the tiny, rolled up tubes of paint to my teacher and asked to use them he wasn’t thrilled, but I had managed to replicate the pigments of my oil palette completely, which being his formulation couldn’t be argued with. I spent the last few sessions of class getting to know the paints while making two simple observed pieces on paper. I found that if I treated the gouache just as I had learned to use oils, with direct color from the tube & precise mixing on a large mirrored palette, simply using water to thin rather than laquer, they basically worked the same.
They don’t make an exactly comparable image, and there are lots of specific ways of working with either that don’t transfer, but my experience with paint to that point could all be nicely transitioned to a much smaller scale of work on paper. With the dynamics of mixing and opacity being roughly the same, almost everything else was different— shrunken and more delicate. I’m not sure why paintings made with water media tend to be smaller but I imagine that it’s mostly because of how quickly the paint dries, but it could also have to do with the sizes that watercolor paper is cut to. Brushes are scaled to fit smaller work and are much smaller than those for oil and acrylic, have very fine, supple bristles, which feel like they would do well to soak up and hold water. The differences between the two are mostly what have kept me using gouache more than a decade after painting in oils for the last time.
Without knowing exactly how to handle the paints at first, I would make a simple pencil sketch and then painstakingly mix local colors very slowly. In oil I had a rhythm for how my early washes & underpainting would dry and change in workability, but I found gouache dries almost immediately, unless it gets diluted to the point of being more like watercolor. So when I first tried using it, I didn’t try to build the painting up in much of a way, and instead just worked in mostly direct patches, like a paint by numbers.
Even though the size of these two paintings is much smaller than anything I made in oil they seemed to take more time. It felt like I was mixing a color for every tiny stroke. That wasn’t really the case, but it was how it seemed after a few hours of painting 2” square.
That’s why these paintings are left unfinished. There’s a scale factor to the time and physical size of the paintings that almost guarantees this format of skeletal drawing to give some indication of the space and then almost a swatch sample of the perfectly mixed observed colors on a small section of the image. If I had known what I was doing with the gouache I could have probably just as easily mixed enough to lay down color fields and make a proper painting, but this language of empty space and inferred texture is something I appreciated in its own right.
A year or two later, I found this way of working reemerge in montage. Here, where a the unpainted areas are a sort of ground, the collaged elements merge with the paint in an interesting figure with some dimension. This kind of image feels to me like it has one foot in the sketchbook and the other in a wire frame rendering.
This kind of speculative imagery encompasses both sketchbook fantasy and virtual reality. It still uses a sample set of colors to render out forms with surprising clarity. The image is nearly complete and almost insists on having some negative space as if to deny the stature of the kind of advertising illustration that it mimics.
Another year or so later, in 2013, I made a pair of mosaic paintings that worked like a multi-directional space-comic. Depending on which direction you read, the space of the painting can be explored on a few paths. Because of when I stopped working on the paintings, the further extents are represented more and more sparsely. There’s a quality of how a memory might look mapped out from the point of most vivid recall, out into more and more tangential and sparse elements.