Painting in series

Working on groups of paintings is satisfying and productive! This way I can achieve a consistency across the series so they will all work together. These are drawings of rock shapes, trying to reference the shape and get a sense of dimension. These are wooden panels so I can really scrape the paint, scratching and sanding then adding further paint layers. The splatters are an echo of lichen greens and pinks that grow on the stones.

Adding layers and trying to keep the shadow of the shapes, I am thinking about the effects of weather over time on the stone and how the elements soften and erode detail. I have used paynes grey for the darkest areas and a cloth to blur the edges, scraping other colours over the top and wiping off when nearly dry to leave a shadow of the colour.

Its common for artists to work on more than one painting at a time, I am doing this for groups of similarly themed but individually different paintings. Claude Monet is a famous example of working in series, he painted a series of the same haystack in different light, weather and times of year throughout his life.

Working this way means I can really get stuck in to experiencing the subject, exploring the texture, shape and colour. Looking at the tiny details that take time to see and replicate at scale. The object becomes familiar and the drawing of it more relaxed and intuitive, I have realised that its not until this stage that I, as an artist, apply my own unique style to the painting, almost as if I can get past the physical object and add something more, is Meta the word?...