I apply paint directly from the tube and with my fingers.
Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color.
Mark Grotjahn's large new paintings abound with torrents of ropy impasto, laid down in thickets, cascading waves, and bundles that swell, braid around, or overlap one another.
And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.
I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife, and I made them sing with all the intensity I could.
Painting is really good fun, I have always enjoyed it. As long as I paint what I want with the freedom that I enjoy, I never tire.
I've been trying to pick up painting but it's hard.
I don't like acrylic because you can't get the density of color. And with each coat of oil paint, the surface gets better and richer.
I love putting paint on canvas, getting lost in the process of painting.
I like to treat paint as material - to daub it, drop it, let it slide. There was Action Painting, but I also compare it to paint effects found on the streets. This approach is superimposed on a sculptural surface that is also 'painterly.'
It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method.
I'm just really impressed by oil paintings - I don't see how people do it! That's the style I like: classic oil paintings. Abstract art just isn't my thing.
Most people wouldn't guess, but I'm really into painting: acrylics and sometimes oils.
I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.
How few of our young English impressionists knew the difference between a palette and a picture! However, I believe that Walter Sickert did - sly dog!
