Burning Planet

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

Burning Planet by Amy Crook

Burning Planet by Amy Crook, $169

A circle is such a simple form, and yet I feel like I could find an infinite variation in them. This one, too, looks the surface of a planet to me, or maybe some alien sun, the swirls of almost neon yellow marked by orange and red patterns.

This time I used my Windsor & Newton watercolors rather than the Japanese pigment inks, and it’s really interesting how the different media react differently to the addition of the salt. Rather than drying to a fine powder, each little spot of orange-red on the yellow paint is actually a salt crystal formed with the pigment-rich water as the salt on top dissolved, and then dried. If you look closely you can see the flat, squarish shapes of the salt crystals (click the image to enlarge). It even sparkles in the sunlight.

Burning Planet, 5″x5″ salt and watercolor on watercolor paper.

Here’s a terrible iPhone photo of the painting at an angle, so you can see the sun sparkling off the crystals:

Burning Planet, detail, by Amy Crook

Burning Planet, detail, by Amy Crook

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Categories: Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art, Series and Books
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