Acrylic, gesso and oil pastel on canvas
24 x 30 inches

While most of my spontaneous pieces come together very quickly, some of them develop over an extended period of time. This piece started as an abstract oil pastel that didn’t quite work for me, so I started covering it with gesso. More commonly used to prep canvas as a base, I enjoy using gesso as an alternative to art-quality white paint because of its texture and the way it interacts with other media. As I started noticing the texture of the gesso and the lines of the underlying oil pastel, I tapped into and emphasized the natural movement of the piece created by the layered media. The end result is a piece that brought to my mind the ferocious beauty of a storm at sea.