Gwen Sanchirico

Painting

Acrylic, gesso, and leaves on canvas.
It started off with me trying to capture an image I had in my head of blue and black semi-horizontal forms, diffuse and foggy, on a white background. There was a red blobby thing in the lower left corner with knobby appendages. That was some sort of focal point, possibly my id in context of my undefined surroundings. This was supposed to be a happy, cozy, content sort of feel. I sponge-painted black and blue on the canvas, and used a knife to thickly apply the red.
Stage two happened when I came home late one night, furious - outraged at the things that originally gave me comfort in the original vision - and took a knife and thickly and angrily applied black paint in broad strokes.
I pointedly tried to paint over the red blobby thing but the paint would not go there. I took that as a cue.
Stage three came the next morning when I was a little calmer and decided to bring back some sense into the painting. Adding lots of an old white acrylic paint that had become quite thick, I delved into more textural relief.
I added a poplar leaf from a tree outside my building, and I cut up a leaf I had used to stamp its impression with on the surface and stuck it onto the thick white paint. I put a layer of sandy (garnet) gloss over the blobby thing.
Then I added more black paint. I also applied Basswood leaves, also from my block, that ihad dried and painted copper and simulated weathering by sponging blue-green paint on them. Still working out that technique.
The leaves, I later decided, were incongruous, so I painted over parts of them. Also, I had made the leaves too glossy and didn't like they way they looked against the surrounding matte paint.
And by now, the leaves really seemed out of place so I painted over them with white. I thought their ghostlike textures were interesting, so I used that. At this point I was building layers of very thick paint over one another.
A few more black and white layers later I decided to add a new element.
Up until this point I had felt a lot of chaos and confusion. This day, I felt some kind of direction and wanted to insert it in the middle of all that chaos.
I think I ruined it.
I needed a few layers to salvage the damage I'd done with the green thing. It was a false beacon, anyway. In the meantime, the original figures were fading, getting worked into the background, covered up with more thick paint.
I added a layer of black and then white. Thick thick thick. Wasn't sure where it was going anymore - which is mostly what it's been all about all along: the tiresome ebb-flow of aimlessness.
A few days and many layers later, I was enraged again. That green thing can go jump in the lake; and out with the red blob. I applied several patches of gesso at this point, and thereafter added more of the original layer's blue horizontal elements. A few days later Jethro talked me into adding more color: yellow ochre, oxide red, my own purple. On top of that, I added more layers of white black, and white with the knife.
Somewhere in the middle of this process - after adding the leaves - I had unconsciously been mirroring geological processes to render fossils, create healed fractures, fold stratd and subject them to differential erosion and deposition.