UFO
2008 - 16"x20" Acrylic, colored pencil, charcoal, oil pastel, newspaper, on canvas.
Finished with one coat brush on Liquitex Matte Varnish #5232
(Available - Inquire for pricing)

February 2008

This canvas originally had a painting from 2006 that I wasn't happy with. There was nothing worth keeping, so it was painted over with black gesso. I started with a pencil drawing that I kind of liked, but it came to a dead end pretty quickly. You can see this drawing below (left photo).

I started randomly adding paint and Brooklyn Rail newspaper collage to the canvas. I had a lot of trouble getting the colors right, especially for the water and the sun. The entire painting always felt like a chaotic mess, so I was constantly reworking sections to make everything flow a little better. I don't like working on canvas because the surface isn't as nice for colored pencils and acrylic paint, especially when there's already layers of dried paint and newspaper collage. However, I use canvas on occasion, because it forces me to work in a different manner, and tends to produce results that I would never get using wood.

This painting is a continuation of "Flying South", which was completed a few weeks earlier. There was originally a strange looking animal to the left of the alligator (see middle photo below). It's a giant, prehistoric mudskipper. These are fish that can hop around on land for a short time. I saw some a several years ago on a trip to Thailand. I wanted to keep the mudskipper in the painting, but decided it was better to simplify the mountain section with the gray paint. The mudskipper will return in a later painting someday.

On the right side is a piece of watercolor paper that had some doodling of the long necked animals used in "When It Rains". The paper was glued and stapled to the canvas. I accidentally tore a 3/4" hole in the canvas when I was scratching up the surface with an exacto knife. A piece of black & white striped newspaper was inserted through the hole and glued down on both sides (middle photo).

The three trees on the left were made by removing pieces of the yellow collage material. I later decided to make the trees white, so I added newspaper as the top layer.