Fish face mash-up

Description

Fish face mash-up, acrylic on canvas painting featuring newspaper collage. This artwork is an amalgamation of some of the recurring themes in my paintings, and a continuation of my weird fishes theme. I completed it in about five sittings, mostly painting overnight. It has a few layers, and there is quite a texture to it, there is also quite a lot going on in the detail. There is some writing in a mix of languages. The newspaper clippings are from a Turkish newspaper and are mostly random, although some words are chosen intentionally. For example, the word ‘borç’ just under the word hope translates as ‘debt’ in English. To the right of the red fish are the words girişimi = attempt and hayat = life. The fish are piranhas. a fish face mash-up.

In terms of technique, it is also a bit of a mash-up, I started with a basic face concept before splashing the canvas and spraying it with water to get runs. After that stage, I added in the two skeletal fish silhouettes before again splashing and spraying the canvas. Around this point, the painting started to take form and I started to slowly add in some newspaper clippings, before splashing some more and then painting in some of the detail (so I didn’t lose the reference) I started scratching and scrapping with a wallpaper scraper to get some lines and ridges in the wet areas. Then added in the piranha silhouettes by applying sizable globs of paint with the scraper (using the paint as the sticking medium), later I added in the black lines and some of the white detail.

I had an enormous amount of fun painting this piece and didn’t hold back at all, I just threw everything at it including any random thing that appealed to me in the moment.