For the past few days I’ve had this urge to leave the acrylics alone and start working in a simpler format. I’m finding that my acrylics are getting dull and stodgy and they’ve lost some of their original expressiveness. It’s time to change things up a bit.

For ages I’ve had this yearning to try out a more expressive style. I don’t normally let loose that much when I’m working, and although my paintings are emotionally full, it’s more of an intangible thing than expressive brushwork. This is something that’s been really irritating me lately, and I’m looking to bring a softness into my sometimes hard-edged work. I was smoky, misty edges, and I have a feeling that if I’m going to attempt that, I might have to set the acrylics aside for a while.

Charcoal

I love the dark, smoky, smudginess of charcoal. You can’t get any detail with it, and that’s why I used to hate it, but now I’m learning to appreciate the way it forces you to go big with your gestures. It’s all about capturing movement and shadow and bright lights, rather than intensively detailed scenes.

I’ve been using it to sketch out beach scenes from the North coast of PEI, and today, some nudes. It’s taking a while to get the hang of, but I’m really enjoying it. It forces me to loosen up, to go with the flow – it’s not a medium that’s easily controlled (much like my arch enemy, watercolour.) However, the same quality that used to drive me up the wall, I’m learning to love.

Ink

There seems to be something about black and white that’s capturing my imagination right now. I haven’t worked in colour since I finished the nude show. I love it’s simplicity, it’s directness, it’s power. And ink is the ultimate incarnation of this.

Ink, on a physical level, is just a very zen medium to work with. You can’t force it. It’s going to do whatever it feels like doing. But it’s so meditative, to watch the way the ink drips from the brush, puddling, swirling, creating beautiful arabesque lines. It makes me want to try abstract art, just to play with the idea of line.

Again, I’ve been doing sketches of the North coast of PEI, whose stark, lonely beaches lend itself well to ink. My next experiment will be ink drawings of some nudes, which will be rather more challenging. With ink, you make a mistake, you can’t go back. You either have to have a very steady hand, or realize that your drawings are going to much, much looser and perhaps not always proportionally spot on.

Oils

I’m finally going to really give oils a go. I’ve been avoiding them for years, despite an almost constant yearning to use them. Oils, with their buttery yumminess, are the perfect medium to insert some softness into my work, so blur those hard edges that always seem to sneak their way.

I won’t lie – this scares me. There’s something about oils that frightens me, and it’s not just the idea of starting all over again in a medium I know nothing about.

Maybe it’s their rules – if you do something wrong, your painting might crack and fall apart years down the road. Maybe it’s that their the old, time honoured, traditional medium. They carry a lot of historic weight. “Real” artists use oils (I know this is bullshit, but it is an idea that some artists and galleries still hold to).

There’s just something about them that scares me, makes me nervous – so nervous that even though I got oil paints as a present for Christmas when I was 18, I’m now 21 and have barely used them. Yeah.

But that’s going to change. I’m going to take the winter to see if I can’t figure out how to produce an acceptable painting in oil. It’s not like I’ll have to start all over again – I’m pretty handy with a brush, and I know colour theory and I’m fully capable of drawing. It’s just getting my head around another medium’s ins and outs, it’s finicky preferences, and how it reacts in different situations. All that takes time to learn. But I think that in the end, it’ll be worth it.

My only regret?

That I don’t have a camera to show you guys this stuff. Sigh. It’s my next big purchase. I’ll just have to be patient.