Preparing the canvas for the Minimalist Seascape

Having also studied the work of Mark Rothko, who was linked with Barnett Newman and the Abstract Expressionists, I'd noticed the layering of coloured paints that Rothko used. Newman's work had much cleaner lines and a thicker, less transparent layering of paint, possibly applied with a roller as it looks so smooth. Rothko's was more likely applied with a large brush, ground and rubbed into the canvas to create areas where the base coat of paint was allowed to glimmer through, affecting the colour that was applied on top, either making is darker or lighter.

After experimenting in my sketchbook with the different versions of the composition and technique that I was going to use for the final painting, I decided that I needed to introduce colour into the ground for my painting. So I layered black, green, red and blue acrylics. This was also in order to make the oils on top richer and and more glossy, so creating a thick luminous sheet of paint, imitating the sheen of water.

This photo was taken before I'd applied any paint, apart from a base coat of emulsion, and it shows the support that I'd stuck the canvas to in order to keep it completely flat, and it also shows the builders plastering tool that I was going to use to scrape the paint across. I didn't want to stretch the canvas onto a wooden frame because the fabric would have sunk in the middle when dragging the plastering tool across it, and there would have been lines on the edges where the wooden beams underneath would have touched the canvas with the force of pressing down. So the best alternative I could think of was to measure it up based on the biggest wooden stretchers I have, so that it could be stretched at a later date, and to tape it all in place, masking off the areas that I didn't want paint on, which corresponded with the edges of the wooden frame.