I don’t mean cooking and painting at the same time or watching cooking programmes when painting (too confusing – I’d end up squeezing tomato paste on to the canvas), I mean experimenting like the TV chefs’ Gino D’Acampo, James Martin or Lesley Waters – when Ainsley Harriot presented the chefs with a bag and they had to pick out items without seeing what the ingredients were.
Seeing the new Ready, Steady, Cook with Rylan Clark-Neal, reminded me that when I used to go to night class (when you were actually able to physically go and be with people??) I had a bag with all my paints in. They were the basic colours with some odd ones that were ‘cheap’ and because I was a student, I would buy them as they ‘would always come in handy’. Ha! That was a joke as they were never part of my usual pallet. I would lug them back and forth to class and return them home untouched. One night I thought, for a laugh, I wonder what would happen if I did the same? In class I took my bag of unusual colours and asked a fellow night-classmate to put their hand in my bag and pick up two or three colours. My challenge was to paint using those colours. Well, that was a challenge as inevitably these unusually named colours would be picked and I would need to use them. It was surprisingly an enjoyable and challenging experience.
Some paintings worked and others less so, but the important thing was that I learned about colours. I also had fun doing it. Why don’t you try it too?
Here is one I did when Quinacridone (magenta/pink) was picked. I never really used pink in my paintings before, but as you can see, this painting ended up with a lot of it! Surprisingly for me, it actually is a gorgeous colour and very translucent. I have since bought more of it and even in bigger tubes.