New Directions - First of a series?

First Day

Following on from my experiments at The Sussex County Arts Club I am embarking on a series of small paintings, all involving a figure to a greater or lesser extent that will be painted from minimal preliminary drawing. I want these to be a "painting" that looks "painted" and not as in my previous work that still to me looks too "photographic". I have long admired painters that have that "painterly" look, that don't get too caught up in detail yet somehow get everything across with attractive brushwork and good sense of colour. This first painting was just an exercise in trying out thicker paint on a different ground that was recommended to me by a very good painter, Darvish Fakhr. Instead of priming the mdf with acrylic gesso, he recommended me to try a preliminary coat of shellac followed by two coats of oil primer. This produces a surface that the oil paint "sits on" instead of the oil in the paint being quickly absorbed by the much more porous acrylic gesso. I want, as with this one, to spend a maximum of two days on each painting so that I don't get too caught up in old habits of tightness of paint handling or inclusion of needless detail.

Second Day