Expressionism

After going to the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces: European Masters and seeing all the paintings, it made me want to get back into painting. I hadn't painted anything since VCE which was about 4 years ago and was never a good painter to begin with but I've always loved the way people can express themselves through the medium of paint and that there is no wrong or right with art.

I thought I'd start small with a small canvas and some basic acrylic colour paints. I've always wanted to do a splatter painting (preferably on a large scale but due to lack of space, I settled for a small canvas).

I began experimenting with different techniques on a piece of newspaper just to get a sense of how things would turn out. I tried to flick paint off a toothbrush and off a paintbrush. I also tried to flick paint off a spoon. These all gave me very small splatters and I wanted to vary the sizes of the splatters so I literally filled up a spoon with blue paint, watered it down with water and flung it at the canvas in one splat. It came up beautifully so I continued doing this with red then yellow, flinging them in different directions and from different heights to get a variation of shapes and sizes.

on the left newspaper you can see the initial testing stage

After I had the main splatters down I finished off the painting by flicking blue, red, yellow and green paint over the top using a paintbrush. This gave me the speckled effect over the top.

I'm really happy with how this painting turned out. I love the layering of paint and seeing the paths of travel from the way the paint has hit the canvas.


This exercise was not just a physical painting but more of an emotional way for me to get creative and see what I could produce.

One day I would love to have a giant canvas and literally throw paint tins at it but that's for another rainy day....