A day after…

The cleaned surface is far from perfect but in general the richness of colour that was lost to the satin finish is back. However on close inspection it seems there are some small areas of the painting that appear to have had allowed moisture? penetration into the permanent varnish coat (made up of three coats).

I’ve read much on here and about the net regarding varnish nightmares and guess I had to have one to fully understand the thing. Will I varnish again? I’m just not sure. Unvarnished paintings have a quality all of their own. And vulnerability over time? … perhaps that someone elses business. Initial searches on line lead me to youtube where sponsored ‘artists’ sympathetically demonstrate varnishing techniques and the NEED to varnish. Of course they have a vested commercial interest in the NEED for me to varnish.

hmmm, I’ve learn’t a lot in this exercise and the sick tummy feeling I currently have shall deffo give the lesson gravity.:cool:

the picture? it’s here. On the wall of the restaurant I don’t think the surface issues will really show. (My client over saw the composition, the central character his logo. was mandatory… for me it was a really valuable technical. com-positional and portraiture painting exercise) hey ho.

Thanks for the compliments.

I cleaned the final board yesterday. I’d got my cleaning technique down by then finally working in 30cm squares with lots of clean very soft micro fibre cloths to take the varnish off when the initial turps soft wash over had dissolved the varnish.

Should I give it a another coat of varnish? acrylic or soluble? to re-unify? I really don’t know.

The restaurant is called the ‘ le melting pot’, it’s in Cherbourg, Normandy. The chef/owner is a friend of mine and he wanted a figurative realistic ish style. He’s worked in kitchens ‘all’ over the world and its reflected in his small ever changing menu. He cooks from scratch 4 or 5 daily stews/curries/ragouts fresh ingredients etc.

It’s about my first large scale figure composition and I really enjoyed making/painting it, especially the flesh parts! sadly I couldn’t paint from live models… I would get friends where I could, but my wife and I modeled all the positions and i’d sketch from these digital photos and refer back to them for tonal details etc… half of the ‘faces’ where based on pics I found on the net the other half I had friends model and the guy pointing is a portrait of the patron. The photo self model thing is actually a technique I’ve been using for a while in my toy soldier production… for these pictures it’s… ‘conceptually implicit’ but that painting is in Gouache and much smaller scale the figures are also ‘isolated’, composition creation left to those who play with my toy soldiers! (if you google ‘walkerloo’ there’s plenty of pics… even a film or two!)

The stumpy figures proportions are just the way I seem to draw figures… even after years of life drawing! also I guess from the toysoldiers via? medi-evil sculpture? Stanley Spencer? 70’s BBC children’s shows, Beryl Cook, Paula Rega…?

I’ve put together a couple of comp pics that show the composition development if it’s of interest to any one (my friend asked me for such a pic for the restaurant bathroom!).

Before the ‘melting pot’ composition I had many other ideas but my friend preferred this, perhaps the more conservative of several propositions. I wanted him as the chef to be in the centre but he pleaded to have his ‘logo babe’ here so hey ho… however this plea came at the end of the figure composing and I never completely re-resolved the off centre composition … its kind of two pictures. next time. I also kind of regret how reliant i became on taking photographs but it such a quick form of image gathering in such a complex and detailed realisticish composition. The photo portrait comp which most resembles the final composition I did just now, all these figure photos were done as i needed them as ‘reference’ whilst painting the picture. The photos were modeled on the figure sketches in the pic above it.

The paint technique is a chardin-esque dark to light ‘scrub’ method I stumbled together after some afternoon painting classes at my local art school. , I paint on to a plywood and I wear through a lot of brushes. Board is what I’m used too because the only other large scale pics I’ve done are for ‘photobooth’ paintings which need to be sturdy in my personal pretend war ‘the battle of walkerloo’… although actually I also did a huge figurative for a mural in a museum show last summer… but that 1Om long picture was done in two weeks to a dead line. The technique was ‘get it on quick’! I messed with a canvas last summer and was amazed at how easily the paint ‘applied’ compared to the hard board – I may try some canvas work later this year…

crikey what an essay!