Night Forest on Halloween

A while back I started experimenting with way of allowing my “canvas”, often of hare hide, to express itself without my painting on it. The logic is simple – since I prepare and preserve the hide, I could do things during that process to bring out the character of the hide before it dries out into leather.

…So, I had to go back almost 45 years to my biology and chemistry classes and refresh my mind about ionization, polarity and crystallization. Specifically, I wanted to experiment with iodine-free salt using either water or isopropyl alcohol to dissolve the salt and get it absorbed by the hide before drying it. Although many decades have passed, I still recall polarity differences between solvents, and how salts when crystallizing are absorbed by organic materials.

… Tried many approaches, dilution recipes, rubbing of the salt on highly vascularized areas of the hide, and drying the hide after a sequence of washes with different temperature water.

Here is one result that has come close to what I was planning, yet had surprises due to the unpredictable.

At first look there seems a lot going in there. My goal was to get tree-like forms appear with higher contrast as vascular tissue absorbs the crystals differently than connective tissue.  Indeed, that did happen, especially when using iodine-free salt.

So, I got the forest I was aiming for. The detail is quite amazing and the direction of the “branches” quite appropriate.

And, the hide dried with different shades of gray, as expected. In this case, the forest got depicted with a dark background, and a feel for depth of field making it a night scene.

Ok, so it is a forest at night. Therefore I decided to give the scene a bit of color and movement and painted a woman running toward the forest.

BUT, it was the unpredictable that was the most delightful in all this. When I painted the woman, I suddenly noticed the face of a man, wearing a baseball hat, and smoking a pipe the bowl of which is upside down! The man has a big but spooky smile… And the white aura around him made me think of Halloween as it is to be celebrated soon.

A haunted forest! How appropriate.

With that mindset, I saw bats flying over the trees.

… This is my Halloween “painting”. It took a lot of experimenting but now I know what works. What I do not know is what will be the result. My canvas has the last word about the eventual message and story.

October 22, 2017

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2017