Paint splash

Giclee will be available with every purchase This subject was discovered one day while exploring the surroundings of my hotel when on a visit to Shanghai, China in September 2019. I was in China to visit an exhibition by the International Masters of Watercolour Association (and to be inducted into said Association) which included a selection of some of the worlds top watercolour painters. I went out for a walk on the last day of my trip to explore the area where I had been staying.

I stumbled upon a selection of very interesting lockups/shops which provided a variety of visual treats one of which was the subject of this painting. As usual for me the colours and the dash of rust on the tin of paint caught my eye and I spent quite a while studying the image considering all sorts of compositional ideas. Eventually I went for a square format and took several photographs due to limitation of time and went back to my hotel to put down some thoughts in my sketchbook. I did not like the original tarmac, so I changed the colour and constitution of the surface of the ground. I also found that the drapery from the curtain on the right hand side gave me the biggest headache in terms of painting, primarily due to the fact that I wanted the material to be soft and slightly out of focus but my initial washes were very hard edged and inappropriate for the subject. This took many washes back and forward until I came to a solution that I was satisfied with. I wanted the largely featureless and smooth surface of the drapery to be a foil to the other parts of the painting which had a lot of texture. The Chinese character above the paint pot translates to “Head”, this made me ruminate on the possible title Pot Head but thought it wouldn’t maybe be the correct thing to do so went for Paint Splash due to the fact there is a tiny splash of blue paint on the ground.