refinery

refinery, etang du berre (32cm x 25cm, oil on wood)

The weather hasn't been too good recently, so I have been working more in the  studio.  I have been working from drawings, photographs and memory.  In the studio I tend to work on images over a series of sessions, letting one layer dry a bit and then working over it.  I quite often make a painting quickly, then scrape it back so that I am left with a ghost of an image that forms the basis for further work.  The scraped back image dries nice and fast, so I can work on it next day.  Sometimes I  'tonk' the original image. ' Tonking' refers to blotting a painting with newspaper, so it sucks out a lot of the oil and solvent in the paint, allowing it to dry quickly and removing any accumulated fussiness.  I think the process is named after Henry Tonks, an English painter who was a formidable and influential teacher at the Slade school of art in the 1920's.  Thanks, Henry.