Oil painting with cloth (con't)

I used bed sheets to stamp, drag, press and pull very liquid applications of paint from the canvas. I found myself replicating varying surfaces of rock and rock formations. Skies too began to take form with the same approach. I found that simple movements of the cloth, held between both of my hands, would produce amazingly realistic images of clouds, mountains, hillsides, rivers and the sea. The cloth, pulling off paint in its very wet state, seemed to automatically leave images that incorporated light and shadow that quickly led to illusions of great distances from foreground to background.

The technique also created a sense of great detail from grains of sand to the fractal patterns of foliage. In some instances, the paintings appeared nearly photographic on first viewing.

Over the four-year period of following this new course of technique, I have concentrated on learning all of the effects that I am able to get from applying the cloth to the wet painted canvas. I want to know in advance how each movement of the cloth produces a given effect. And as I learned to repeat certain movements with the cloth to get what I expected, I also continued to try to expand the use of the cloth for additional imagery. For example, changing the position of both hands with the cloth held tightly from horizontal to vertical attitude, I found new ways of representing trees and flora.

Applying the wet paint on top of previously stained areas and repeating the process one or two times prior to letting the paint dry, resulted in yet more layers of texture and fine detail. The detail began to look like etched surfaces with the canvas playing a major role as under-surface. The primed white canvas began to serve a new purpose in that it showed through the varying thicknesses or layers of paint that had been left by the cloth.

More recently, I have extended the application of the turpentine by letting it run free from the top of the canvas to the bottom. In a traditional landscape scene with sky above, land mass below, I have found ways to both use the cloth to create the forms in the sky and land (or water) as well as letting the stains from the downward running turpentine etch their way through the painted surface.

Now the actual process of painting is both controlled and uncontrolled to a large measure. And the speed with which the painting takes form is greatly accelerated.