FURTHER SIGHTINGS - Fane Flaws
Black Barn Gallery - July 26th - Aug 7th 2007
I was offered a show at Black Barn with very short notice. I had been thinking about making more bird paintings on a larger scale in oils and I had already made a series of gouache studies, so I decided to go-hard and make the new paintings quickly.
I spent a fortune on canvas, and was completely broke when I stumbled
onto a job-lot of tube oils in a junk shop. I bought them (despite the warning bells
clanging madly) and began to paint like forty bastards. After three weeks the underpainting was still not dry. I tried everything. Sun and wind in the daytime, banks of heaters at night, but I could not get the tacky surface to settle - it was the dodgy titanium white. By this time I was beginning to fret. It was three weeks to the opening.
I gingerly put another set of large canvases on my account and started from scratch in acrylics, working like a zombie. Bron and I hung the big paintings butted up against each other like cartoon panels and I remember the look on her face when I said -”We need to leave a space here - there’ll one more tomorrow.” The
last one was finished at 4a.m. the morning of the opening.
Every painting from this series is now sold - must be something about the birds.
Fane Flaws August 2007
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