Painting Description

This acrylic stain painting from 1969 shows a young Old Order Mennonite woman in her kitchen. For several years I experimented with this staining technique which owes much to watercolour. Only here and there are there opaque passages. As time went on, I moved to a much more opaque approach as I wrestled with a variety of surfaces, finally settling on gesso-coated masonite. Twenty years later I revisited the watercolour idea but using acrylic in place of watercolour. It is that approach on absorbent matboard that I now use for sketching both on my travels and at home.