When I paint over old or unfinished canvases, I suppose the reworking is a kind of renewal?

Sometimes I’ll have painted something I really enjoyed making at the time, and I may have liked it OK but didn’t ever love it. So at a later date I’ll often pick it up and start layering onto it some more, directly onto the previous painting, adding on top of what’s already there (rather than covering it over completely with white gesso and starting again with a clean sheet).

This particular painting had two previous unfinished beginnings, basically creating underlayers – at first it was a kind of abstract waterfall landscape, which I kept looking at trying to work out what it needed to make it look and feel more how I wanted.

And eventually I decided I simply wasn’t feeling it any more so what it needed was to change to being something else, something way more abstract grunge-looking, so I added some tissue paper collage and faded stencils and even more drips over the top.

That version felt a bit better for a while, but still not quite right. So I kept looking at that, too, still not convinced that in its current form it was ever going to give exactly whatever feeling I was trying to convey with it, then last week I picked it up again and just kept going, but in yet another different direction…

On a whim I added raised thistle stencils with texture paste, softening and blending the background with multiple paint glazes, acrylic ink washes and more tissue paper collage, and this time I’m so much happier with how it looks, and have called it done!

The thing about making paintings in this way is I probably couldn’t have made this painting look quite the same without those previous layers being there – they give a depth, a ghostly history of previous mark-making, and thankfully, finally I love the way it feels.

So there we have it, it’s now a textured abstract thistle landscape and will most definitely more than likely be staying that way! 🙂

Fandango’s One Word Challenge: Renewal