Creating Physical and Visual Texture using paint

I found it difficult to come up with subjects for this exercise as I wanted to think in terms of either physical texture or visual texture.  A combination of the two seemed difficult to achieve, it is as though one's mind set thinks in terms of painting in a representational way i.e. visual or in a more abstract way, physical texture.  There is no reason why this should be so.

I re-visited to a certain extent the work of Malevich from Exploring Concepts with my first composition.  Except that this time I am representing a theme around 52.  This represents the number of playing cards in a pack and also the number of weeks in a year.  The white crosses outline a minimal pattern on the cards but also represent gravestones.  Strife, indicated by the red arrow, is not a game but which takes place, throughout each week of the year.  The cards are painted with visual texture complete with shadows, but enhanced with physical texture in the form of white crosses (tile spacers). The background is textured blue/black.  I wanted to use pure alcohol to achieve effects on the blade but I had already painted in the red paint.  I could probably have achieved the effect with another colour but I didn't want to change the red arrow as its colour is symbolic.

For my second picture I decided to use one of the photos I had taken in Spain this year.  I had concentrated on old derelict buildings.  Having enhanced the picture I printed it off and used it as collage and then built up a foreground of rubbish from various things such as foam pipe lagging, wood chip, old rust, lolly stick, dried leaves and sacking.  I used spray acrylic and ordinary acrylic paint as well as artex texturing.  I hope I have interpreted the exercise correctly, and am pleased with the outcome, it gives the bleakness and desolation that I was after.  I also used a slightly different palette from what I am used to, which I felt was good.  I think this was as a result of looking at Tapies' work in more detail.

 

 

My third picture was again from a photo taken through the car window in Spain, whilst driving down to Murcia. There are lots of these fortresses, churches etc. on mountain or hill tops.  I enlarged this one and used artex to cover the buildings and introduced sacking into the grass, otherwise it was acrylic paint used impasto. It is mainly therefore an example of visual texture with minimal use of enhanced texture.

 

 

 

 

The final example of mixed physical and visual texture is taken from a sketch and photo I did some time ago at Cove Hythe, where the church is about to fall over the cliff.  I decided to introduce a bright colour scheme similar to the work of John Piper. Again it incorporates artex for the building but otherwise just acrylic paint, oil pastel and indian ink. which I worked with oil to try to gain a different type of texture. There is also some metalic paint. I was also thinking of Peter Doig, for the distant trees, but I couldn't quite get the effect I was after.