Tag: acrylic painting

Auntie Sade

Posted on by Alan

Continuing with the series of portraits of folks met while on trips to Nigeria. Seems to be a thing developing here. This is Auntie Sade, who I met for the first time in 2014. Sade is the reliable housekeeper and amazing family cook. I’ve often seen her preparing meals with industrial quantities of tomato and pepper (chili) with freshly prepared chicken – feet, beak and all. Now in her mid seventies, she prepares food in the traditional way, and so wraps her
moi-moi in Uma leaves (Thaumatococcus daniellii also known as Yoruba soft cane) rather than foil or plastic bags.

Monkeys in the Grove

Posted on by Alan

MonaMonkey
This painting is of a Mona monkey, part of a troupe that visit the Osun Grove regularly, where they are tame enough to accept bananas fed by staff and locals. Painted using acrylics, plenty of colour and the use of energetic brush strokes evoke the vibrance of Osogbo, the serenity of the forest and my excitement at being there.

Previously I have experimented with the faces of these monkeys with a view to producing some designs for t-shirts or whatever. Something that’s on the back burner, which is piled high…

 

Harbinger

Posted on by Alan

These are interpretations of some false colour images of C2012 S1 Ison, currently speeding it’s way towards the sun at 2 million miles a day, having entered our solar system for the first time.

comet-2-oil-pastel-on-tinted-paper
Seems a bit weird to draw something that is traveling that fast on an A4 sheet with just a few pastel strokes. Comets have been seen and recorded for centuries, sometimes spookily called harbingers of doom. Said to be an icy body that, when passing close to the sun, heats up and loses gases to form the “coma” and tail, sometimes visible without a telescope if bright enough.

With this blue version, adjusting the colour values of the scan resulted in this
cool 3d type effect… Something that might work well on a large scale, I settled for this modest size canvas
for now. Ison may never come back, but it’s just amazing to me that all this stuff is out there, beyond what we could ever hope to hold in our hands.
I once introduced a friend to vegetable gardening, walking in the woods, taking photographs, the pleasures of seeing, not just looking at nature. In her open minded and naive way she used to say “Isn’t nature great!” How right she was.

falsecolour-comet-acryliccomet-oil-pastel-on-tinted-paper