3 days work condensed to 1:44 seconds for your viewing pleasure!
I’ve done it! The preparations are complete and now I am ready to begin painting on the large canvases.
In the background, you can see the to-scale test paintings which I have begun. These help me to work out any final decisions before moving on to the large canvases.
For a closer look, see my next video: an introduction to Lange Nacht, the open studios event we had at StudiosID last week.
I would like to give a shout out at this point to the talented Emily Bland. Why? Let me tell you a true story….
It’s circa 2010, I’m living in France and just starting out as a painter.
I’m determined to learn the whole process of making a painting, including stretching my own canvases, but I keep getting stuck when it comes to the corners, they are harder than they look!
Hunting around on YouTube I finally find an artist in the UK whose technique is easy to follow. I will always be grateful to Emily Bland for showing me how to stretch canvases.
Fast forward to November 2016: I am sitting in a very cold studio in Berlin suffering culture shock and wondering how to move my body enough to paint when I hear peals of laughter coming up from the studio below. I discern the lady downstairs is probably a fellow Brit and tell myself: if she can not only survive here, but sound like she is enjoying herself, then so can I! Without realising it, she gave me hope.
It took a couple of years before I met my colleague from downstairs, we both attended a meeting of what would become an organising committee for open studio events at StudiosID.
I asked her name and it rang a bell… I had to go back to the computer and check through my YouTube searches… would you believe it… it was Emily Bland, the very same artist who taught me how to stretch canvases all those years ago!
Since then, we went on to found Studios ID Collective and had many other adventures together. Thanks Emily! Do check out her abstract paintings, she’s working on a really interesting project about a chair at the moment.