I made a collage series on actual Monopoly boards a few years ago. See here.
By a twist of fate involvings attics and ladders and rental properties and sheer fatigue, the series ended up in my lounge room recently. So when I bought myself a new roll of black double primed canvas (my first) Kimonopoly was on my mind.
Since one subject is as good as any other, particularly when I haven’t really painted for around 2 years now, (just books, as this blog will attest!), I set forth to spend a week painting in a lovely cottage in Bowral with just my acrylics, some masking fluid and my black canvas.
Of course I realised I needed many more things, but sharing the house with me were a printmaker and another book artist who was learning to make jewelry, so some of the other things (a white pencil, an eraser… why did I not take a pencil case?) came my way through them.
I ambitiously cut a few 1m square canvases, marked out the monopoly board in white pencil and started masking. I’d made black and white print outs of some of the original collage pieces, because it was the kimono designs that I needed many of.
The 1m piece is here.
I also experimented with some 25cmx25cm square pieces (thinking I would line them up and make them equal a 1m x 1m (it was the amount of canvas left over on the 1.55 m wide roll when I took off a metre). They were marked out too. And in a very controlled (for me) way, I filled them in. It was not inspiring, but it was what I’d intended to do.
Some of them seemed finished (see pix below). But those that weren’t after a little masking and some play with crossing the boundaries of the Monopoly board ended up being so much nicer than the “finished” ones I added to them.
So some of these pictures I cannot tell you which ones they are the deep history of.
I also did a 50×50 I’ll call Face Kimonopoly, because I did attempt to put the face from the originals in there, but the random masking looked so good I painted over the whole thing. History of the piece here.
And then there was the 50×50 I did as a random boxy map thing, and the 50×50 I did as just random boxes. Both of which were eventually masked and took on some lovely different life. They are here.
What I learnt:
abstract artworks are NEVER done (i knew this already)
the process by which i stop playing with an abstract artwork is very unscientific, but benefits from multiple breaks
Watched a Winsor and Newtown video this morning about Titanium White vs Zinc White – i was disappointed at how flat the colours were in these pieces, and I was using Titanium White (Titan eats the Colour, according to Winsor and Newton. I can’t find the video I watched, but here’s the same information). So I need some Zinc white to keep going properly with these pieces (and get the colours more vibrant).
I’m not finished this series yet. Got two days of concentrated painting tomorrow and the next day. If i have the time to go pick up some zinc white I’ll be very pleased to play some more!
