Oil painting with cloth (con't)

The “happy accident”
One painting in particular, a small image portraying large towering, geometric rocks, back lighted against a hot magenta sky, became the talisman for my new work. I began the painting in a traditional manner, using brushes and layers of color to “build” the larger rocks, standing like sentinels against the sky. But I left an area to the left rough, intending it to become a background or indicator of scale and distance.

However, as I didn’t get to that small area on the left for a while, my rough painting had become set up and appeared too dark to serve its purpose. To undo the area, I applied turpentine repeatedly and used a very stiff brush to scrub off most of the paint. In the process of “cleaning out” the area, I also used my cotton cloths to stamp the surplus turpentine. The result was that I began to see a textural effect that appeared more like the surface of rocks than what I had already painted to the right.