14" x 11" This year I've been painting with oils on canvas, for the first time in 18 years. I'm using a high grade canvas, and fairly expensive water-soluble oil paints. It makes a huge difference using the most expensive materials that you can afford. The texture of the canvas, the tooth, the way it resits and holds the paint, is like working with something organic, like skin. The images in the painting are derived from the same source as everything in the last five years: half-remembered moments from family stories of my grandfather, a coal miner who was once trapped underground during a roof collapse. The apparently abstract marks are in fact derived from similar sets of shapes that I recall from art history. In this case, from a painting by Pierre Bonnard.
Artist Philip Hartigan talks about art, interviews other artists, and more