Study in Texture Technique [OIL PAINTING SERIES]

[painting]

Study in Texture, Technique, Temperature: Painting, Oil on Canvas

Medium: Oil on Canvas / OIL on Wood Panel // Role: Artist (painter)

*“Cinque Terre” [Sarah Hopkins — Oil on Canvas]*

Objective and Background:

In this series of paintings, I focused on texture and technique. I had been working to perfect my precision and technique as a still life painter for three years, painting exclusively on wood panels with small brushes. I became obsessed with texture, and I always felt it was the one element of my still life paintings I had not been able to translate.

My goal was to reimagine my relationship with still life and landscape through this series of paintings by completely changing my process of creating texture.

*“Vanessa” [Sarah Hopkins — Oil on Canvas]*

Process and Outcome:

My process involved sketching a subject on canvas with tonal wash and a wide, soft brush. I then brought the canvas back to the studio, and began applying color based on imagination and memory, a much different approach as I had taken with past paintings. For this series, I used palette knives to apply color to large canvases, doing most of my mixing and blending on the surface itself.

As my process continued, I experimented with new techniques of applying texture. In the painting below titled “Sun Scraps”, I scraped globs of dried, mixed oil paint from a glass palette and then manipulated it and applied it to my wood surface by hand, covering it with new tones and using it to create textured highlights for depth. The fact that I was able to create a comprehensive, unique painting almost entirely from “scraps” of paint that I had planned to discard changed the way I identify and use materials available to me. The process of scraping and applying paint without a brush drastically expanded my imagination and feeling in the subjects. What resulted was a series of three large paintings that emphasized texture as a subject in its own right, rather than only emphasizing the details of the subject itself. This discovery changed the way I reuse and reimagine materials in my work.

*“Sun Scraps” [Sarah Hopkins — Oil on Wood Panel]*