100+ Small Paintings Challenge – Another Update

Back in January 2020 I decided to set myself a challenge of seeing how many small oil paintings I could produce in a 12 month period. By the end of the challenge I’d created just over 100 paintings (initially I thought about aiming for 1000 paintings but I soon realised that this wouldn’t leave me time for any other art projects, and might send me potty).

'Explosive Entropy', 2020, oil on board, Wayne Chisnall

Not wishing to overload my blog with photos of works from just this one project I decided to post about it in small chunks, over several posts. So far I’ve posted around 60 of them. And here’s a few more, from number 61 onwards.

'Hooded Hollow Dog With Hunting Hound', 2020, oil on board, Wayne Chisnall

My initial thoughts behind the project were that I'd knock out a load of quick oil sketches as a way or generating a few new ideas and trying out different painting techniques. Although some of them did end up being more considered and time consuming, most of them were quite spontaneous and painted relatively quickly.

 

'Death Loiters', 2020, oil on board, Wayne Chisnall

There is something quite liberating about just painting with little or no forethought. Obviously, much of the work wasn’t of any great insight or of the best standard (as I’m sure that you can tell from some of the weaker pieces), with many of them being little more than oil doodles or silly cartoon characters. But I did find that working at this fast and less self-conscious pace threw up a few gems; some that I felt could stand their ground as finished pieces and others that generated ideas for further works. When all is going well there’s something quite Zen about making art. In the right state of mind everything flows perfectly, but becoming aware that you’re in that state invariably pulls you out of it. Looking back at the pieces from this self-imposed painting challenge I can see the ones where I was in the zone, and ones where I wasn’t or where I was flagging.

'Hooded Hollow Dog Warrior II', 2020, oil on board, Wayne Chisnall

Apart from two or three, all of the paintings in this 2020 series are painted directly to the painting's surface with brush and oil paint, rather than being pencilled in beforehand. I really like the immediacy of this approach. You can often end up with a piece that has a vibrancy that you might not have got if you were being more considered and calculated.

'Stripy Striding', 2020, oil on board, Wayne Chisnall

The mini oil paintings/oil sketches that I produced during this project are mostly painted on small, wall mountable, plywood or chipboard plaques (recycled form pieces of  Victoria and Albert Museum packing crates), or on old book covers and recycled pieces of primed mount board (recycled from the V&A museum's Paper Conservation Department and from their Picture Framing Dept.).

Nest

I've only relatively recently returned to painting with oils. What I love about this restart is that it feels like I'm starting from scratch again, and approaching the medium anew - experimenting and learning as I go. I've discovered that some of my most enjoyable paintings to paint are the ones that I've executed quite quickly; starting and finishing them in the same day (sometimes over a period of a few short hours). This approach, which negates any over-thinking, seems to give the work something of a sense of immediacy. Often, the first instinctive brush stroke is the right one; one that looks natural and unconsidered. One of the problems of going back to an area of painting and reworking it is that your one brain can sometimes get in the way and you end up painting something that looks over-considered, and you lose that perfectly balanced sense of randomness or imperfection.

'Nest', 2023, oil on board, by Wayne Chisnall

This piece, Nest, was painted over a few hours one evening and is made using charcoal and oil paint. I think that I tend to draw with oil paint as much as I paint with it, so I consider most of my oil paintings to be oil sketches. In the days that followed the painting of this piece, I would keep returning to it, looking at areas that I could build up - adding highlights, darkening areas of shadow, add detail, etc. I could see potential for more fully formed painting, but I resisted. Many of the paintings I prefer are ones where the artist has stopped a little short of completion - ones where the workings out and heavy brush strokes are still evident.

I also use charcoal in a very heavy-handed way, rather than in a more traditional way with its subtle blending and shading. I'll use the charcoal at the same point as I use the paint (rather than the standard way of just using the charcoal to do an under-drawing, seal it, then paint over it), drawing over and through the oil paint, and sometimes painting back over it. 

As I said, my use of charcoal is quite heavy-handed, and the sticks of charcoal often snap in my handed when I'm drawing with them. However, I like the fragments of charcoal that burst across the painting when this happens and I usually keep the pieces in it. The only issue I have with this is that if I then want to varnish the painting I'm going to have to find a way seal the charcoal first. Traditionally I'd spray it with fixative, as I would when drawing in charcoal on paper, but first I'll have to look into how the fixative might react with the oil paint, and if varnish can then be applied over the fixative. But that's a problem for future Wayne - man I don't envy that guy.

Hydra Horsey (Finishing Touches)

I'd not been happy with the upper background section of this painting since I painted it in 2019. So I've just got round to changing it. Like a lot of my recent oil paintings, this one was painted quite quickly, and without any preliminary sketches (just painted straight onto the canvas, sketching the image with paint brushes as I went), so I didn't want to overwork the touching up. One of the problems of returning to a piece of work that was originally executed in a very intuitive state of mind is trying to get back into the flow of that, especially when returning to it some years later. The retouching ended up not exactly as I pictured it (the colours are right but I'd imagined it more as a few simple brush strokes), but it's close enough that I'm happy to now leave it as it is. As the quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci goes, 'Art is never finished, only abandoned'.

'Hydra Horsey', 2019-2023, oil on canvas, by Wayne Chisnall

Here's a bit about the painting that I'd written in a previous post -

This painting that I did from memory turned out a bit more sinister-looking than originally intended (quelle surprise). It's inspired by something that I saw when I went to see a school play with my brother, in which my nephew was performing. The play was a mash-up of various Greek myths and in it the Hydra, a multi-headed serpentine monster, was played by a group of kids, all of which were clad in black with black tights on their heads. After the play I was standing outside with my brother whilst the cast of the play was running around the playing field, full of post-performance excitement. Whilst chatting with my brother I noticed in the distance, two of the Hydra heads from the play were on all fours and giving rides to a couple of even smaller kids, who were using the legs from the tights as reins. It was a bizarre and funny sight, and I remember thinking at the time that I must do a painting of this.

I posted some photos of the painting on social media, during the various stages of completion, and received a few comments from people likening the rider figure to that of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. This wasn't initially intentional but I guess that there's often a lot of things going on subconsciously, and when you make artwork it's sometimes hard to block out all the external influences that one gets bombarded by. But that's also the beauty of art; it's a language with multiple readings and constructed from layers of diverse thoughts and ideas. The process of creating art is one of constant discovery, where each brush stroke or unintentional mark can suggest an alternate direction. I'm pretty sure that the children I saw on the playing field that day were girls (although they were quite far away in the distance) and when I started the painting the figure of the rider I wasn't sure what gender it was going to be. All I knew was that it was going to have a mop of blond hair. Maybe the Trump/Johnson comments influenced the direction of gender or maybe the work had already decided the direction.

The Sky Begins At My Feet (The Wrekin project)

Last year, I and the rest of the Wellington Arts Collective (a recently formed collective of artists living in or near the Shropshire town of Wellington in Telford) were commissioned by the Telford and Wrekin Council to create a public art piece at the summit of the largest local hill, The Wrekin. The commission was part of the late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee 2022 legacy. 

'The Sky Begins At My Feet' (work-in-progress), ceramic tile installation atop the Wrekin, 2022

As well as being a celebration of the rich diversity and heritage of the area (being the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and the most geologically rich site in the country) the art installation, titled ‘The Sky Begins At My Feet’, also had to have a practical function. It had to serve as protection for the eroding base of the trig point at the peak of The Wrekin. 

pre-fired clay tile intended for the Wrekin project, by artist Wayne Chisnall, 2022

Our solution (devised by local ceramics artist, Sharon Griffin) was to create a tiled step/platform around the base of the trig point. The platform was made of concrete but the cladding was of hand-made ceramic tiles – all made through workshops that we ran with local artists, community groups and school children.

'The Sky Begins At My Feet', ceramic tile installation (by Wellington Art Collective) atop the Wrekin, 2022

As is often the case with these sort of commissions, the deadline for completion was extremely tight, with just a few weeks from receiving the commission to having to have it installed. But we all pulled together as a group and managed to finish installing it in the autumn. Oddly enough, the official unveiling ceremony for ‘The Sky Begins At My Feet’ fell on the very same day that the Queen died. 

ceramic tile for the Wrekin project, by artist Wayne Chisnall, 2022

For my part in the project I made a few clay tiles, mostly inspired by my interest in nature (mainly of the vines that I source from local woodland). However, the only tile I made that was able to be fired and glazed in time to but used in the installation was one that depicted the Earth and a pair of crossed spanners. Mimicking the format of a skull and cross bones, the tile was intended to act as a warning, with the spanners referencing the region’s kick-starting of the industrial revolution (and the resulting climate change that we now face) and the Earth symbolising nature.

5 pre-fired clay tiles intended for the Wrekin project, by artist Wayne Chisnall, 2022