Giving a shot at Japanese black ink...

The production of a realistic black ink image on rice paper has been a goal of mine for a while. Last week, I dug up a high quality Japanese ink stick and an ink stone to see how this method (grinding my own ink) compared to the use of regular liquid black ink. I wanted to have more control on tonal values, something I find hard to achieve with liquid ink. I also wanted to produce better greys.

Using a multilayered approach, I produced this painting on rice paper, which I glued to raw canvas as a second step...

The resulting image exceeded my expectations. In the future, I want to intervene on these black and white renditions using bold color passages, without having to overuse paint in an attempt to mask imperfections that should not be there in the first place. The clash between a perfect black and white image and bold paint is for me the ultimate in contrast...

Note: I have used fine charcoal or soot directly on raw canvas with some success, but I find black ink on rice paper to be superior. Moreover, textures can be obtained while mounting the paper onto canvas

Soaking in art...

In late September early October, a couple of weeks was spent in Amsterdam and Belgium visiting the family and taking advantage of museums (Rijksmuseum, Van gogh in Amsterdam) and art exhibitions (Dali in Liege, private galeries)...

Back to my art, I did an experiment framing one of my recent works using a plexiglass casing. This could definitely be an interesting avenue with a number of my collage paintings.