Hair Helmut

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All The Pictures In My Head - Red Series (Painting 4)

(18" x 24") - Acrylic Paint and Charcoal on Canvas

Hair Helmut has no compelling story or inspiration.  I simply looked at a picture of a large rock sculpture circulating on Meta (formerly Facebook but not Twitter which is now X) and liked the form so much, I started sketching it on canvas with a charcoal stick.  

The painting part of the process veered dramatically, however, from the reference image the longer I played with it.  At some point, any semblance the painting had to the aforementioned rock sculpture disappeared completely and I was in open waters from then on.

Hair Helmut is a play on words--a play on German words--that can be spelled, combined, and read several ways depending on the context.  I like this kind of ambiguity in my work where things can be read multiple ways, where no single definitive definition stands out from the others.

How I got from rock sculpture to Hair Helmut is anybody's guess.  But I like this piece and find it has many interesting qualities I want to explore further in future paintings.  Integrating charcoal with acrylic paint is fascinating to me.  Charcoal dust has magical properties you can only fully appreciate after the wet acrylic paint has dried and the dust settles into place for good.  It makes painting with acrylics even more emergent than they are without the magic dust.

The canvas for each painting in the Red Series was primed with cadmium red medium hue.  Newsprint and water were used to peel away successive layers of paint, revealing the common mother color binding them all together.  This painting and the techniques I used to create it illustrates to me that semi-figural subjects are possible, and even more invigorating in some ways than painting with conventional brush work.