19th January 2023

This week everything just started to come together. My first painting is egg tempra on a plywood offcut.

I loved mixing and using this paint. I used one egg yolk for this whole painting. I was inspired to try this method by a Cathy Pink painting at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol.

To make the best of this medium I need to spend a lot more time understanding how to blend and layer the colours to get the tones I would like. The painting below started out as a mark making exercise to understand using egg tempra and mixing the paint. The flowers just emerged.

The upside is how easy it is to clean my equipment. Downsides are you can’t store this paint and would need to remember your mix to match the shades, it drys really quickly.

I feel I created “flowers” in a naive style. One of my fellow students said it remined her of Renni Mackintosh, maybe I was subconsciously channeling some China I have at home with his designs on? As I was taking photos I noticed the red plastic coffee table we have in the studio at University. What better irony to photograph a sustainable piece on a mass produced plastic table.

I will use egg tempr again, but I will have to adapt my technique to get the best of this medium.

My next image is paint using linseed oil as a binder. I deliberately kept it to a very limited pallette of three colours.

As I started to put the paint down using a pallette knife I remembered a photograph of my friends horse I had taken. His coat is a mixture if these hues and the painting morphed into an abstract representation of him.

I don’t have any air tight containers to store the oil paints. Something I need to figure out how I can do this in a sustainable manner.

This way of mixing paint really suits my style of working, I can see myself using this a lot in the future.