Saturday, August 4, 2012

Painting and impasto with John Forrester Clack

Great Thursday painting class with John Forrester Clack. John talked to us about paints, grounds, supports (canvas, board) and his work.

Recently John has been working with heavy impasto medium, which is applied to a board, then paint is applied onto this when the impasto is dry. John's particular technique for applying the impasto medium to the board wasn't suitable for our setting, but we enjoyed using the impasto to 'draw' with.  John has a fascinating range of brushes, I really loved the badger hair brush. It was beautifully made.

This is the first time I have made a thickly textured painting. Also we didn't do any preparatory drawing, just got on with moving the medium around and exploring it's qualities. Thick impasto takes a while to dry and, it being a cold day, we needed to use a hair dryer to get it dry enough to apply the paint to.

We chose two colours and worked them carefully into the impasto. The high quality of John's paints meant that we used very little and the colours were brilliant.

Green face
There was a spare board when I had finished my first painting so I got a tiny bit more paint and 'drew' into it, great fun. I nearly feel like buying some good quality oil paints.


We found out that our paints don't have a lot of pigment in them, bummer!