Wrestling with Demons

Acrylic, 14" x 18" on canvas.


OK, so you may be asking why this ordinary-looking painting is called Wrestling with Demons? A good question. There are a couple of answers.

1. Demon #1: Time pressure. I needed a Mother's Day gift. Quickly. I had one eight hour day to paint, let dry, varnish and gift wrap. NOT my preferred method of work.

2. Demon #2: Done in acrylics. My preferred medium is oil, and although I am pretty much the I'll-Try-Anything Painter, even I know better than to try to get an oil painting to dry overnight. Been there, done that, not going back again. So oils were out. Being the art supply slut that I am, I have a ton of Golden acrylics and mediums so I thought why not haul them out.

3. Demon #3: Style. Mom likes pretty pictures of happy things. I'm more of a dark expressionistic kind of girl....okay, so I needed a reference to work from, something cheerful. I turned to a picture taken of the beach near our house as an "acceptable" compromise.

I don't know what I was thinking, but I proceeded exactly as I do for oils, making an underpainting in umber and white in four values. It was an actual, realistic, detailed underpainting and I was pretty pleased with it after a couple hours. After lunch, I thought I'd throw on some glazes and be done with the whole thing by dinner.

Little did I know. The acrylic acted totally different than oils (duh!). It was transparent when I wanted it to be opaque and opaque when I wanted it to be transparent, it would not go on smoothly without an "edge", and sort of fuzzed out and covered up the underpainting when I tried to glaze. There was no soft gradation like you get with oils, just a bunch of smearing with a hard line at the end.

I completely lost my underpainting which ticked me off. I couldn't blend anything at all due to the fast drying....I was getting that anxious, stressed out sensation of "this isn't working" and seriously thought I was just going to have to pitch the whole thing.

But you know, I'm a Virgo and stubborn as hell. I keep working until it's done. Dammit.

Finally...in desperation...I decided to change my tactics to using the flat planes of color to model the landscape....I still couldn't make the edges work where they came together so I used a black outline, which I found pleasing in a Georges Rouault kind of way. I sometimes do this in my oil painting, and I was glad that I could carry over at least *one* thing from oils to acrylics.

I kept comparing the painting to the original for values and mixing colors accordingly, based on value and attractiveness rather than local colors from the reference. Is it my imagination or do acrylics change color as they dry? I swear it was changing before my eyes.

At about 9 o'clock at night, I finally did wrestle it into what I could consider a finished condition. It's odd, because it looks so unlike what I normally paint that I have no way to judge it. Richard only saw it at the end and said it looked "colorful and pretty" which was the point. It will look nice on Mom's wall in the gold frame I'm going to put it in. I think it kinda looks like a Peter Max shower curtain that I once had, but it's DONE.

I now have tremendous and undying respect for people who paint with acrylics and make it layered and glazed. For me it was like painting with stuff that looked like paint but was actually Elmer's glue. Wow. I have no idea how acrylic painters do the beautiful stuff they do.

If I had started off using planes to model the form, it would have taken me 3 hours instead of 10. Doing an underpainting was a complete waste of time....I might try something similar in oil with planes or *maybe* try acrylics again with this method....when I'm feeling up for a challenge.