Universal One II
ink, acrylics on canvas, 120 x 100 cm, 2020
Second painting under the “Universal One” title so I guess it makes it series now!
The first painting sort of “happened” meaning I did not know what the end result would be. In fact, there were probably at least 2 other paintings underneath before it turned into the piece that it is now. With second painting I wanted to replicate the process from the first one so I could turn it into a workflow that can be used in future work.
The thing was I didn’t really remember how I came about the initial acrylic layers, especially that first layers were tightly coupled with previous work that was underneath first Universal One. Second painting started from clean canvas and I did not go through turmoils of changing ideas or composition - which is rather rare in my work. As a result of this the initial acrylics layers were too detailed, they already included a fair amount of shading. I also began inking with acrylic ink (Liquitex) and it quickly turned out that it was not going to work well. As I suspected, acrylics ink is too fluid and its black level isn’t anywhere near shellac based ink. So that was it for staying within acrylic media, I decided to keep using shellac ink and the painting had to be in mixed media technique again.
In the end, although I’m very happy with the result, I have a feeling that I “over engineered” second Universal One a bit and will most likely try more loose approach the next time.