Bend the rules: A case for oil painting on paper

Presenting… Pick-n-Mix! An ongoing series of oil paintings on paper.

This series developed as a side-tangent to my paintings, as a way of testing ideas in a non-committal format – paper. By working with paper – an inexpensive material – I learned that I was much less likely to overthink what I was doing, and allowed myself to play with paint in a way that is totally different to working on canvas or panel.

To recreate the scale of my panels, I taped several A5 sheets together to create a ‘tester’ sheet – and it was only when I deconstructed these larger sheets that I discovered the ‘pick-n-mix’ series – I ended up falling in love with the accidental landscapes formed in the reframed marks, abruptly cut off by the confines of the a5 sheets.

Forcing surprises like this has since become a staple in my art practice – when I find myself feeling stagnant and I’m struggling to trust my intuition, I’ll often be found masking, cutting up or drilling holes in paintings to remove my control a bit. Give it a go yourself, and let me know how it goes in the comments below or over on Instagram!