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Abstract art print: Woman in Temple

by Marten Jansen








Abstract art print: Woman in Temple
This artist's style of painting is particularly involved and time-consuming so to be able to offer an affordable series of artworks, it becomes necessary to create a seriegraph. Then screen printing comes into the picture - because of it's high quality the average person will not know he/she is looking at a print, in first instance, instead of an original painting. Peculiar to screen printing is however, that only a limited number of colors can be used, for details please see screen printing.
So the challenge was to greatly reduce the number of different colors that I normally use. Here it has to be understood that for instance light-blue and dark-blue count as different colors - if one wants to use a certain color, exactly the same shade has to be used on every brush-stroke. Slight deviations are smoothed out by the screen printing process, but the fewer deviations, the closer the art print will come to the original painting.
In "Woman in Temple" the number of colors could be limited to eight colors, plus black and white. Three different media were used: oils, acrylics and oilbar. It's often convenient to start a painting with thin acrylic paint, just because acrylic paint has little "body", as we say. In a painting's opening stages, one doesn't want to be too definite yet and a low-body paint leaves room for change and more than one interpretation of what is painted. Then, as the painting evolves and more details are required, it's both undoable and undesirable to use acrylic paint on a large painting like "Woman in Temple". Undoable because acrylic paint is slow to dissolve in it's solvent, which is water and it would take forever to prepare enough diluted acrylic paint, because usually one needs only small quantities at a time, to work on specific details. As said, it's also undesirable to finish a large painting with acrylics, because as soon as a composition becomes more definite and pronounced, the artist needs a high quality of paint to solidify his ideas, as so to speak.
In the meantime one can go too far with carefully and neatly finishing the painting, such that the spontaneity and expression are partly lost and that's where the oilbar comes in. As the name says, oilbar is a bar of solid oil paint that liquifies when pressure is applied. With an oilbar one can draw with oilpaint directly on the painting, without a brush. Because of it's size and the high quality of it's paint, an oilbar can be used on large paintings and it's artistic advantage is that it allows the artist to obtain particularly expressive effects. Therefore oilbar can be very convenient to add renewed expression and action to an overworked painting. As an example, the red arc in the center-right of the painting is due to oilbar and keeping in mind that it's a rather large painting, it (the arc) could hardly be produced with a brush, because a brush somewhat limits the artist in his movements, while an oilbar gives much more freedom to draw spontaneously. The red arc counteracts the rhythm and direction of movement of the painting, while it has been assimilated in the composition.
Sadly I haven't been paid by the producer of oilbar to promote their product, but it happens that, for me, as an expressionist, oilbar is a very important tool. Normally my methodology is cool and controlled but oilbar unleashes my alter ego, as in Jekyll and Hyde. I have to say that when applying oilbar the meticulous craftsman changes into a kind of Neanderthal that grunts while swinging his club, in my case bar. It's sure is a buzz and it's great to be an expressionist.



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