New abstract work - Torrit Grey

Thinking back over this week, I have to say that -- aside from "mayhem on litho street" (see previous post) I had a really good art week. In painting we started talking about abstraction which is my preferred style after all. It was a very busy and somewhat stressy week at work again, but I feel better about my project now than I did before. And I think that make it possible for me to let loose a bit and actually produce decent stuff.

The two pieces I painted this week are both abstractions, but both were developed out of the grid exercises about which I wrote just 2 blog entries ago. Only this time I went beyond the grid and used it just as a starting point. I quite like the resulting images. The first one (Tuesday) was done in brown tones only.

The other one (Thursday) is painted using a very unusual paint, namely "Gamblin Torrit Grey", which literally contains all pigments you can imagine. I painted that piece with Linseed oil and Stand oil as medium, instead of my more customary Gamblin Galkyd Lite. It will probably be a much glossier piece. But the paint also moves differently with pure oil medium.

For instance the wide stripes where I just moved ink with the palette knife across the piece would probably look a different had I used a more lean medium as the layers of oil don't move as freely over each other. I really like the effect.

Now about Torrit Grey. Gamblin does something really cool. Every year when they need to clean the filter system at their factory they take out all the dust they collected over the year which essentially is a mixture of every pigment imaginably. But instead of carting this off to a landfill, they just grind the dust into new oil paint. The yield is around 5000 tubes each time and they make those tubes freely available to artists. Because the consistency of the filter dust is different every year, Gamblin Torrit Grey is different every year. But it is typically some form of gray. And to make things even better, there is a contest to make a painting with Gamblin Torrit Gray (+ white + black) and the winner gets a gift certificate for Gamblin products. I really like that concept, and it's one of the reasons why I think Gamblin is so cool (among the other reasons is the wealth of information about painting materials on the Gamblin web site and that if you ask a tricky question you might actually get an email back from Robert Gamblin himself). Ok, I stop rambling. Here is more info on Torrit Grey on the Gamblin Web site... Oh and in case you wonder, this painting was done with 2006 Torrit Grey. The 2005 was more reddish and I haven't seen the 2007 Torrit Grey yet.