Home: experimenting with text and perception (oil on board, 2025)

Oil on Board, 21 by 46.5cm

This is a quick alla prima study of my home in the snow, painted on board. The board was formerly packing for furniture, which is why the dimensions of the image are a little odd.

The board was prepared with white gesso. I filled the empty space with writing about my home with a water-based marker, and then used clear gesso over the top of it. This creates the smeared writing effect you can see around the edges of the painting.

The approach was just a little experiment - something I wanted to try. I've always been interested in the intersection of text and image. This was one way to see how it might fit into my work.

I do quite like the visual effect it has - but the really interesting part for me was that writing about my home and my experiences with it was a way to start thinking about the subject I was going to paint before I was actually painting it. This is one of my quicker paintings, and one of the things I love about painting in oils is that I have time to think about the image and the subject and the theme and all things that relate to it, while I'm painting. The writing time gave me an extra half an hour of thinking about it to warm me up, and in this case it was all done in a single session.

I don't know how thinking about the painting before doing it by writing about the subject first will have affected the end result, but I'm sure it did. If it affected how I perceived the reference, the colours, the proportions? We only experience what we perceive, and what we perceive can shift dramatically for seemingly small reasons.

The smeared writing wasn't actually intentional, but we experiment for a reason. If I come around to trying something similar again, I'll try to avoid smearing it by using a permanent marker or similar. Maybe I won't like that as much, but I'll be interested to find out.