Fossil

…..something that may seem a bit different, though it may not. Some may remember I was given by a dog, well that is to say the dog dropped it by my feet probably expecting a game of fetch…..a flipper, such an interesting thing in itself. I kept it. It was all bones and skin, the bones still held together. This was last August and it’s just sort of been there in view as I am painting…..not really knowing what to do with it. Far to interesting to throw away. For a while it never even occurred to me to try and identify it, well a few weeks ago I did and it kind of hit home, another creature gone. The flipper belonged….is that that the right word, or perhaps part of would be better…..I have to be a bit careful here as I could easily get side tracked into a discourse on Fuzzy logic, re Bart Kosko….it’s an interesting read. Lets just say it is, to the best of my ability to identify it…. the flipper of a bottle nosed dolphin. What ever happened to the creature I will never know. But having that knowledge made me want to do….something with it. Commemorate it’s life or just to acknowledge something about this wonderful species. So I am going to, have in fact begun to…… include it into a painting.

Firstly the canvas has been stretched and primed. It is a 30×60 inch piece. the next thing was to embed the flipper into the canvas and I did this by first cutting into the canvas and using small strips of canvas to make a hollow area that the flipper could be placed in. I then made up a mixture of micro crystaline wax and genuine turpentine heated until thoroughly mixed and after placing the flipper into the hollow I then poured the liquid around then flipper…..

In an excited sense…. for me that is… I understood from the outset of the idea that this is akin to fossilizing the flipper, it reminded me of the ghostly fossils Aaron and I found embedded in limestone on the shores of the dingle peninsula when we cycle toured Ireland in 2017. So then the painting has started today with staining the canvas…..It will go through many changes and excitedly I have to idea what those changes will be. I’ll be doing a blog about this on my website…..but here are the first two images……

Detail

A new piece begins

Indoor swimming pool commission

Indoor swimming pool commission. Five 38×90 inches and two 70×82 inch paintings……

The 38×90 inch paintings all need to be carefully taken off the wall and cleaned. I do this from time to time throughout the year to prevent the build up of salts that condense out of the atmosphere of the swimming pool. It is not just that they condense, but with all the activity in the pool the paintings are often splashed and so as the water runs of a build up of salts is deposited leaving vertical streaks on the surface of the paintings…..

This year was more complicated as some people had been playng ball games in the pool and had used the two larger 70×84 inch paintings for target practice. One had suffered 19 impacts and the other 29 impacts. The damage was so serious that the paintings were ruined. Each impact had generated multiple concentric ring cracks around each of the impacts. Think of them like ripples from dropping a stone in a pond the ring cracks correspond to the peaks of the waves…..well anyway they were beyond repair……So after giving the gallery the bad news and a working plan and after some meetings with Tresco Estate, we came to the conclusion that the best thing to do would be to replace them……it took four months.

This time however rather than allowing it to happen again and assuming that there would be some idiots capable of doing the same thing again l lined the back of the canvas with hardboard…which had to be sealed to prevent warping in the humid atmosphere……scary stuff because it more than doubled the weight of the artworks. Once installed I was checking on them 2-3 times a day to make sure the wall fixings were adequate to the task of holding the paintings securely in place……six months down the line all is still well…..

An example….this is an image of just one of the 48 impacts on the two 70 x 84 inch paintings

…..and this cleaning in progress….you can easily make out the difference between the cleaned are and the area with the build up of salts…..

The salts do not affect the paint at all. When I first received the commission to do these paintings. I understood the necessity of protecting the paintings from the humid environment of the swimming pool. For the most part I always use Michael Harding and Old Holland oil paints. They are superb. but as a precaution I contacted Michael Harding and actually got to speak with him about the problem I had in protecting the artworks from the swimming pool environment and he recommended another one of his products….a doubled rectified wax based matte varrnish…..odd stuff to use but it is spot on and has never deteriorated or reacted badly to the atmsphere of the swimming pool……Gret stuff