Colony

Detail of a painting by MJ Seal that looks like a group of lacey pink coral polyps with strawberry jam colored insides

What could hiding within these little chambers?

“Colony”- Original painting by MJ Seal. Acrylic on canvas, 14” x 11”. C. 2020

The starting point-

I was expecting this to turn into something vaguely coral like

This began as a gessoed canvas I painted with a translucent glaze of violet- which then sat around for a few years patiently waiting for me to get cracking on it again.

So….

Eventually I did. I slathered some white and grey paint mixed with Open Medium onto it and then pressed some wadded up cloth into the wet paint.

These polyps have deceptively delicate, lacey mouths

The voids left in the white paint by the fabric made me think of little cells so I just went with that.

As I built up the highlights I created a lot of texture which the final glazes of color help to emphasize

I liked working up from a darker background in this and using glazes of white and various reds in tandem helped to give these strange little chambers a surprising amount of depth.

*Stay Productive-Stay Safe*

4 Comments

Leave a Reply to Lee Louise Cancel reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s