Thursday, September 6, 2012

A dress burning

18 Years
48x36
acrylic on canvas

I took a little break from painting landscapes to go back to the Silent Voices series. This is the latest piece. So far I have 10 of these canvases done and one collage/acrylic piece on watercolor paper. Working on this image was a challenge. I used my granddaughter's dress for my reference and I burned through several  birthday candles in order to get the image down of the flame and wick. When I started I wasn't happy with the look of the dress burning so I mentioned to my son that it would be great if I could actually burn the dress and take photos. Well of course he thought that was an awesome idea - FIRE! Let's go! Lucky for me, my son and daughter-in-law didn't have a particular attachment to the dress that their daughter had outgrown so I was free to burn away.

 

The trick was getting shots without destroying the whole thing. I still needed it to paint from so I had to preserve most of it and hang it back up in the studio.


It took a minute for the flame to take but once it did it went up fast. As you can see, we got the fire stomped out before the dress was gone. So now it's on to another canvas. I don't have the next painting for this series worked out in my head yet so I may work on a landscape next.

No comments: