Tim Nash - Landscape in Mixed Media

Our Autumn/Winter programme got of to an excellent start with Tim Nash demonstrating how he works in mixed media.

What you see above is the end of a journey that began with looking at several textured surfaces including several old paintings that could be distressed and changed in a variety of ways to make them more interesting.

The painting surface of choice was mount board to which torn up pieces of textured wall-paper had been added using PVA. Generally, the textured paper was added to the lower half of the board so that a 'quieter' area was left elsewhere.

You can get some idea of the textures from the image on the right here, particularly if you zoom in.

And, yes, there is a painting that looks suspiciously like the one we ended up with!

But on closer inspection it proves to be far less interesting.

You can see that more clearly in the next image.

This was the starting point.

The next bold step was to use a roller to apply gesso. Not what you usually want to do with your paintings!

After making some changes to the appearance of the roof, Tim went on to add some text which was then distressed so it was slightly less obvious.

Tim also said that, when he adds blocks of text from newspapers or magazines, he will often paste it upside down. Text the right way up tends to grab the attention and viewers tend to read the text rather than look at the painting as a whole.

Here you can see some lines have been added to indicate tree branches.

The light coloured branches were created by dragging a palette knife through the green foliage paint before it dried. The darker branches and twigs were also done with the palette knife which was used rather like a pen after dipping it into acrylic ink.

Here Tim adds some darker tones in front of the house.

And this is where we'd got to by the break. 

The next two images show with what fascinated interest the demonstration was watched.

And finally, a detail to show some more collage elements
and the chain link fence created by
using plasterers scrim to print an image between the posts.