Painting of a Siren of the Sea

Artistic Painting (acrylic on stretched linen 58"X26")

Artist: John Potter

This painting fits into a series of paintings exploring the use of custom linear halftones (which is the fancy title for the dark lines in this painting) I have been working on.

This painting started as a concept for a mural. The concept was rejected without explanation but I liked it enough to want to expand upon the initial work I had done. I kept the limited palette from the original concept and there was a portrait of similar scale in the original but most everything else changed. No longer limited by the practical matters of painting on location and at a huge scale I expanded on the concept.

I wanted to create a color pattern that morphed into another, more linear pattern that would define a drawing. I painted the value patterns of the blue hexagon pattern as if they were lit from the left. This can cause the additional sensation of volume. I wanted to create an image that is multiple images and your mind or view switches from one to the other, at once seeing a pattern, then a portrait, then 3D shapes etc. I tried to scale the linear pattern as large as I could without loosing the image of the portrait so that the pattern held equal or similar importance.

I spent a lot of time drawing and trying concepts and making adjustments on my computer for this painting. The actual painting process took about two weeks with most of that being drying time before a next step. Work started in early March so the whole process took about a month and a half but it was intermittent.
The painting is acrylic.