August’s Plum Blues

Description

August’s Plum Blues Original Silk Painting and Signed Giclee Prints

This painting was for my twelve days of Christmas project in 2015. Each day I looked ahead to the months of the next year.

A few years back when I didn?t have quite so many jobs and had a bit more time on my hands, we used to have an allotment with a plum and a greengage tree. Come harvest time I used to rope the children into a bit of character building hard labour. They were ok with this until the year of the bumper crop when we picked over 80lbs of plum and greengages. They actually didn?t complain too much about the harvesting, it was the rather heavy featuring of plums in our diet for the next few weeks which pushed them over the edge and led to the composition of ?The Plum Blues?. This went something like?

Woke up one morning, there were hundreds of plums, We plucked and plucked ?em till we bled from our thumbs, And it took aaaaages and aaaaaages to pick those greengages?..

OK, so the songwriting needs some work??.

My paintings are mainly painted on pure Chinese habotai 8 silk with specialist silk paints. I start each work with a drawing on paper and then trace the image onto a piece of white silk stretched onto a wooden frame. I then apply a special paint called gutta, which contains natural latex called gutta-percha, over my traced lines. This creates a resistive barrier through which the coloured ink will not flow. I apply the coloured ink with a brush and use salt dropped into the ink whilst wet to created textured effects.

The finished painting is removed from the wooden frame, ironed to fix the colour in the fabric and stretched onto acid-free mountboard ready for framing.

You can see a time lapse video of me painting?here.

A signed giclee print is printed on fine art 308gsm paper using archival inks and is signed by the artist. It is an open edition so there is no limit to the number of reproductions that can be made. The following sizes are available: