6. ART : Medium Acrylic

The Sun has been a favourite subject for artists.

There is no artist worth her salt who has not painted some aspect of the sun or the other, at some point of her life, as an artist. Well I am no exception! But I found painting the sun in the same old way – oh! so boring, so I decided to make an abstract of it ie. not looking like  the real thing. Artists mostly paint the rising or the setting sun because those are the times you can actually look at it and appreciate its beauty. I thought of painting the rising sun and demarcated the lower edge of the canvas as the horizon. The suns rays are of course linear but I decided to digress and instead made them circular in keeping with the preference of the universe for all things circular. To break the monotony of the circles I put some brown verticle motifs which also provided a break from the sun colors. This corner (lower right) denotes earth and its flora.

While the rising sun is orangish I made it a bright gold and instead used all its beautiful colors in the background ranging from alizarin crimson and cadmium red  to peach to pink ie from a dark to a light shade. The golden rays of the sun have also been softly merged with the background at the tips.

The second is a painting of a blue colored bird which my sister tells me is a Nilgiri fly catcher. There was a time when I was painting everything blue specially a lot of blue sea and blue sky. Suddenly I saw the picture of this cute blue colored bird on one of my sisters bird books. My “blue” mood took a fancy to it and I decided to make a quick  bright painting of it, so selected acrylic as the medium of choice. Since the acrylic paints dry very fast merging effects were not to my satisfaction, so I have used small hatching strokes, which overlap.

The third is a mural of Ganesha on thin plywood. It was made with ceramic powder kneaded with fevicol to a dough like consistency. The colors are acrylic with pearl shine.

*Acrylic paints are derived from petroleum. Acrylics contain three basic ingredients – pigment, water and synthetic resin which acts as the binder. To improve the paint’s performance other ingredients such as plasticisers are also added.

*There are many kinds of speciality acrylics including the following: irridescent colors simulate the look of metals such as gold, silver and bronze. Interference or refractive colors change when viewed at different angles. Airbrush colors are watery thin.

*Acrylics are suited to hard edged paintings because of its rapid drying time. On the other hand unlike oil paintings your work is dry and ready as soon you have made it.

Article, photograph and painting by Parmita