WAPPING

This is my new painting called Wapping:

Wapping (1)

Acrylic and mortar on canvas.  760mm x 760mm

Actually, it's not new - it's got my 2014 stamp on the back of it, and I've been tinkering about with it for a whole year.  Its proper title is Wapping (1), as there is another piece to accompany it, but that one is some way off completion.

Rather than talking about what 'Wapping' might mean, or where, or when it might have been, I'd rather write about the composition and technique.

It appears to be a Coeruleum-blue rectangle on a rusted metal plate background.  I achieved the 'rustiness' of the background by first laying down a mortar base, which not only gives the right texture, but also allows the many subsequent coats of very wet paint to merge across the canvas.  The blue rectangle itself is built up from a number of layers of additional canvas, and a number of coats of blue colour of differing values to give a sense of depth.  The lower area of the blue rectangle has been modelled and coloured to also appear to be in decay.  This raises an intended ambiguity: is it a vertical surface, or a horizontal surface (like all my other work)? - or is there a suggestion of perspective?

The ambiguity is reinforced by two modelled changes of depth on the red metal which blatantly suggest a vanishing point, and this is emphasised by the most vivid yellow rusty areas appearing to burst from behind the blue rectangle.  

What took me so long to achieve was this ambiguity between flatness and depth.  It is exactly what I wanted when I set out a year ago - I never thought that so much thinking could go into putting a blue shape onto red background!

Wapping (1)

detail
...the diagonal does not radiate from the corner: that would have been far too obvious!