One Night at the Circus
In keeping with the theme of my paintings from 2020, I did a small series in 2021 based on photos at the circus or fair. During my younger years in Massachusetts we lived behind a Home Depot and every year the parking lot would be commandeered for a week by the travelling fair. I would walk with my dad and my sister a couple times and we would eat cotton candy and candy apples. We always road the ferris wheel. I loved all the lights against the dark sky, the lusty teenagers running around hand in hand, the clown costumes, and the smell of fried food and sugar.
In this series I was experimenting with placement of the figure onto the blank canvas, scale of the figure and how to incorporate abstraction through patterns and transpacency. I was also playing with ways to apply paint. Smearing it away, thinning it out, scratching it, painting wet on wet.
Since picking up oil painting in 2017 I have loved exploring the myriad ways you can apply paint to a canvas. In Grumpy Clown I love that you can see just a tiny corner of the underpainting in the top left corner. I left it there because it worked adjacent to the yellow clown hair. I didnt plan it but I loved it. I also painting the face with a technique that is new to me. I smeared thin purple paint all over the parts ofthe face with white face paint. I waited a day until the paint was tacky but still somewhat wet. I painted with white and the little bit of purple that ran into the white gave the face a beautiful depth and shadowm that I didnt need to go back and detail or highlight anything.
