Christopher G Marson

One of the paintings done as a demonstration for the Zoom workshop on acrylic painting that I recently gave.

It is somewhat larger than the paintings I have been doing from home for the last few months. It made it easier for the participants to see what I was doing.

For reference I used a watercolor done on location at the top of Mount Douglas during a walk with friends several years ago.

It was painted on a very smooth prepared panel with the largest brush i could get away with (about an inch and a half in width) I was using Turner Acryl Gouache my current favourite medium and found that the paint just flowed onto the surface. Very enjoyable.

With a lot of assistance from Heidi Cowen our curator at the Dockyard Arts Centre I gave my first Zoom workshop this past weekend.

Apart from a few technical hitches, the modem we were using started to fade and has since been replaced by our ISP and my elderly microphone also gave up the ghost later in the day this also has been replaced with something more modern. We ran the workshop as two sessions one in the morning and then repeated it again in the afternoon in order to keep the class size smaller and more manageable.

I was somewhat nervous about the whole process, but the participants were kind and it all went well.

The project is finished, a daily for the Dockyard Arts Centre everyday for 365 days, it has been an interesting experience, I think I have learned a lot about how to put gouache on panels, and even more about preparing panels, I had plenty of time to experiment.

I highly recommend the process, having a commitment to provide a painting to someone else means that the painting gets done everyday, no excuses, no “I’ll get to it later ” no ” I think I’ll take a break today” just put paint on panel, because sometimes the best paintings happen when you least expect it.

After a while pulling out the equipment after breakfasts becomes a habit and it’s a positive habit. I do believe that this is a good thing.

The habit continues, I just did my daily, but it is not 8×6 and it is probably going to go in my group show with Jonah Jones and Charles Knights. It is however another gouache, habits are hard to break.

The Artcentre have sold a couple of hundred of them and the remaining ones are slowly going up in price as the supply diminishes. This is a fundraiser after all.

You can see the complete collection on www.artbermuda.com and the remaining originals hanging on the wall at the back of the gallery.

I will be posting some of my favourites from the year.

I am still doing my daily every morning, it has become a ritual, eat breakfast go get my pallete box and do a painting.

So far they have all been gouache, I have been trying out different ways of putting it down moving more towards oil technique and less of my natural tendency to do a watercolour when the paint is water thinned.