Sunday Miracle

I feel obligated to paint my beautiful peonies that are now in bloom so I arranged a bouquet, pulled out a Venetian Red gessoed cradled panel and I began, thinking I would use acrylic for the underpainting as I have done in the past with pastel and with oil. I began with my usual negative attitude about acrylic. I am a fan of nuance and acrylic is not an easy fit for nuance.

Grumble grumble about how BLATANT acrylic is - completely lacking in subtlety.

But, I just kept piling the paint on and fortunately made some appropriate choices about color, value and temperature that actually created SUBTLETY! In this step I added the darker value on the left.

I honestly did not know I could achieve this look with acrylic because the vast majority of work I see in acrylic is a perfect fit for the medium. It is bold and punchy and primary. That was the artist's intent for their art and the medium suited the intent. 

So why do I keep trying to use an unsubtle medium for nuanced work? 

Because I have a large collection of acrylic paint and because I don't have to frame acrylics under glass! For those reasons, I have tried every year to bond (no pun intended) with the medium. This year I am more hopeful than ever before that I can adjust my attitude about this medium to appreciate it's attributes.

Here are some examples of how I have used acrylic in the past.