Oceans

Inspirational song for this “cherry blossom” painting is Oceans from Pearl Jam.

Lyrics have this deep note of longing and at the same time promise of hope of meeting again. To me it corresponds with Corto Maltese´s her, a woman that he never captures, although many could have taken her place, he remained alone. That´s why I made him sleep/daydream of her. And ocean in the background is his unsettled thoughts and emotions. As perfectly described in the lyrics of the song.

As for technique, this time I experimented with wet on wet painting. Wet on wet is perfect for aquarelle, ink and oil technique, and basically not for hard acrylic surfaces. I had one small bottle of basic acrylic emulsion and acrylic gloss finish that I spilled over gold surface for the parts that should be the ocean. I didn’t have any acryl ink, so I watered down acrylic paint with emulsion. Pulled few lines of ultramarine, prussian blue and cyan with aquarelle brush. And then left it to develop itself, and to dry. The result was more than great. I´ve got this fantastic randomness in waves, an organic and living force of ocean.

As for Corto, I didn´t try to base it on Hugo Pratt drawings. Made a simple sketch on canvas with pencil, adjust it with few strokes of brush, got the character and that was it. As simple as possible, although he is there, he is not stealing the picture with his presence, he is more there to frame it, by breaking the first plane. I think I made Pratt and Hiroshige proud 🙂

Technique: acrylic on canvas

Size: diptych 100 x 250 cm
(39.37 x 98.42 inch);
each panel 100 x 125 cm
(39.37 x 49.21 inch)

Year: January 2016

Availability: In Private Collection


Dōjinshi

Dōjinshi is very cool practice in manga world. It means self-published and it´s largely based of fan-art works of recognized creators’ works. It is like Pop Art practice but more freely spread and more concerned with storytelling and that is a part that actually interests me. Unlike Pop Art´s way of exploitation of the popular image, I rather want to tell a story through the used popular character.