May 10th, 2011.

I found these stones with interesting patterns on the beaches and rivers around BC. On my first attempt at photographing them I took the photos against a backdrop of mossy bricks, and it looked awful.

Back to the drawing board, literally, where I reworked an old experimental painting to use as a background. It was from a decade ago, and was of some sort of plaster that hadn’t adhered that well to the masonite ground. Taking all my grey and black acrylics I proceeded to make a new dark background. As most of the acrylics hadn’t been opened in 11 years they were in pretty poor shape, and I had to spend a lot of time removing the heavy plastic gunk and remixing.

Ultimately, the background was repainted with the Mars Black, Payne’s Grey (deep bluish grey), stainless steel (silvery metallic), a pre-mixed grey, fluorescent blue and cobalt blue. What was interesting is that the particles of silver from the stainless steel registered as little white stars in the background of the photos.

I have to do some more thinking about photographing the stones themselves. I poured water on them to intensify the colour contrasts but this caused a shiny super reflective surface. Perhaps a better camera with a polarizing filter will show up the patterns better.