the many layers of life

This page went through a lot to get to this. To start with, I decided to do the opposite of everything that I thought of. I wanted to put gesso through a flower stencil in the top right corner, so instead I put black paint through it on the bottom left. You might be able to see a pale green flower shape in the centre. My tendency when I have a partial pattern from the gelli-print - i.e. where a mask has gone off the edge of the plate - is to put it on one of the edges of the page. So this time I put it in the middle. You get the idea.

Anyway, as you can imagine, this resulted in a background that was one hot mess. I'm sure on another day it might give me something amazing, but this wasn't that day.

What to do?

White acrylic brayered over the whole lot, of course. And some of the surface must still have been damp because the brayer picked up small bits of paper and redistributed them elsewhere. Now the surface was a bit grungy. I could work with that.

Now I worked the way I wanted to. But the bits of the previous play still show through. This page wouldn't be the same without all that went before.

Much the same as our lives.

The many layers of life build on one another. Some may become obscured as others come into focus, but each contributes to the final picture.