Acrylic Paintings

(Because of the way my screen is calibrated these images may appear darker or more strongly coloured on your screen than they are in real life)

Comments on sketchbooks acrylics mixed media oils drawings

Rosie Britton

Acrylics by Rosie Britton
(Click on image to see painting. )

As a painter I tend to either work fast, trying to keep things looking as fresh and spontaneous as possible,or I go to the other extreme and build up a patina of paint, a palimpsest that has an old and 'distressed' look about it. The two paintings below illustrate these very different approaches.

In the painting of the orange trees I was trying to capture the mood of a fleeting moment when a handful of happy children were scrambling up the trees collecting the oranges that were later served for our lunch at Dar Sinclalr. I didn't want it to be too clear exactly what was going on, since for me the painting was about their carefree laughter, the anticipation of a delicious lunch, and the pleasure of sitting working in the February sunshine in a magical garden in the hills above Tangier. The strong sunlight and deep shadow meant that it was in any case quite difficult for me to see exactly what was happening up there in the branches, or on the ground below. I hope that the looseness of the brushwork has captured something of this. If you want to look more closely, click on the images, but

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In the second painting I was trying to achieve something very different. In Morocco the interiors are often varnished to a soft glow with a treatment called tadelakt, while from outside the most lovely of the old buildings often look crumbly and well-worn. So much of the true life of the country has a very interior nature, and I wanted to try to capture a sense of the time-worn subtlety that for me seemed best achieved by building up layer upon layer of paint, with occasional hints of what was lying beneath the surface.

One attraction of acrylic paint is the transparency that can be achieved by using layers of glaze and the two paintings below illustrate my pleasure in this. In them I have especially enjoyed the contrast between the opaque areas and the transparent.

For a painter like me who is intrigued by how paint works, acrylics provide a never-ending source of fascination. To create subtle colours I always premix my own paints, mixing dozens of different hues and tones made up from just a few pigments and then storing them in plastic pots, keeping the transparent ones quite separate from the opaque. That way I avoid the raw look that acrylics can have when mixed straight from a tube. The joy of acrylic is that you can then drip it, wash it, spatter it, splash it, scrape it, scratch into it, shovel it on thick, glaze it to a whisper.... And if you don't like what you get, you can just go back on yourself and start again!

Comments on sketchbooks mixed media oils drawings Rosie Britton