Arches Red Rocks
After Contexturalism was born out of the necessity of blending the colors and patterns in the background of my painting Not Monet's Sunflowers, I decided that I liked the textured effect so much that I should try using it to paint some entire paintings.
We had recently visited five national parks in southern Utah, and the textured red rocks we had seen there seemed ideal for Contexturalism. I searched the photos I'd taken from our trip and quickly decided upon one of my favorites from Arches National Park for the painting. There was great texture not only in the red rocks but also in the cloudy sky, and I loved its compositon and colors.
As I attempted my first completely contextural painting, I needed to plan out the total process before starting. First I would do a quick pencil sketch of the image on the canvas. Then I would paint the entire canvas using two to three coats of just the base layer colors. These colors would need to be lighter than the colors used for the patterns that were to be painted on top of them and would result in a 'subdued' version of the painting.
Next I would paint all of the the patterns on top of the base layer using more vivid colors. The patterns would also need to be painted with multiple coats to assure that the base layer wouldn't show through. Finally a layer of dots would be painted on top of the patterns.
I decided to use a small 12" by 16" canvas since I had learned from painting Not Monet's Sunflowers that the multiple layers of paint needed to create the contextural effect would take a major effort to complete. As expected, the initial steps of drawing the sketch and painting the base layer colors took only a few days, but painting the intricate patterns and then the dots proved to be challenging. Each pattern needed to be painted with two to three coats using the smallest brush I could find and each dot had to be added individually. These last two steps took about two months to complete, even on this small canvas. I could only do this highly detailed work for an hour or two at a time before my back and shoulders would start to cramp.
Since I was still exploring my contextural style, I continued to experiment with new techniques. I made an important discovery that by varying darker versus lighter colors for the dots, I could create different textural effects.
For the red rocks and bushes, I used darker colors for the dots than for the underlying patterns.
For the mountains, sky and clouds, I used lighter colors for the dots.
These two approaches produced very different effects. Using the darker colored dots on the red rocks and bushes added even more color and caused the textures to be more pronounced. The lighter colored dots on the mountains, sky and clouds resulted in a more blended effect where the texture was still there but less obvious. This second blended effect was the same one I used for the background of Not Monet's Sunflowers that allowed the sunflowers to pop. The use of the darker colored dots for the red rocks and the lighter colored dots for the mountains, sky and clouds combined to make the red rocks pop even more, as you can see below in the finished painting.
Forbidden City Dragon
As the basis for my second contextural painting, I chose a photo from our visit to the Forbidden City in Beijing. The entire Forbidden City was a visual treasure land. Near the end of our tour in the back of the complex we came upon a beautiful wall of porcelain dragons.
I decided the right-most dragon would be a great subject for the painting.
Even though my first small contextural painting had taken 2 months to complete, I decided that this painting needed a larger canvas to allow for the proper detail. I chose a 20" by 24" canvas, two and a half times larger than the first one and tried not to think about how long this painting would take!
I used lighter dots on darker patterns in the upper portions of the painting to provide a smooth blended background for the dragon, similar to the backgrounds seen in my previous paintings.
However for the waves beneath the dragon, I developed a new contextural technique. I painted parallel curving lines to provide the feeling of the waves' motion. Then instead of using dots on these curving lines, I painted darker dots onto the lighter base layer between the lines to further enhance the feeling of motion. Contrasting white wave curls were added using white dots on slightly off-white patterns.
For the dragon itself, I painted its scales using darker patterns over a lighter color base layer. However I painted lighter dots only on the inner portions of each pattern leaving the dot-free outside of each pattern as the outline of each individual scale.
I also added more color by painting the dragon's horns and eyes in yellow and its claws, tongue and fins in red and pink.
I was pleased with my second contextural painting even though it had taken me about six months to complete and given me many aches and pains along the way. The painting had not only allowed me to use the contextural techniques I had developed to date, but had also presented challenges that caused me to develop some new ones for my contextural arsenal.
