Category Archives: Painting on Canvas

Fire Escape (Details of Work in Progress)

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Acrylic, ink, pastel on canvas (2024)

Size: w 20″ x h 40″ x d 1.5″

This painting is taking hours and hours but it has gradually revealed itself in depth, texture, rich colour. Not quite finished, as yet.

Nereids and the Ruby Sea Dragon (Detail of Work in Progress)

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Acrylic, ink, Japanese paper on canvas (started 2021, still in progress 2023)

Size: w 22″ x h 28″‘ x d 2″

This is the first of two (or more) baby octopuses joining the Nereids in this painting. I think I am procrastinating about finishing the sea dragons who occupy the bottom half of the canvas, but who’s in a hurry? Unfortunately the sun came out when I had just gotten started photographing, so the top half of the image is a bit obscured in the glare.

Nereids and the Ruby Sea Dragon (Details of Work in Progress)

Posted by npaul on

Acrylic and Japanese paper on canvas (started 2021, still in progress 2023)

Size: w 22″ x h 28″ x d 2″

I started this painting over two years ago. It went off course into a dead end and has been collecting dust for some months now. Recently I painted over the bits that weren’t working. We’ll see where it goes. The tentative title is still the same, though I have yet to paint the ruby seahorse itself. The leafy seadragons, seen back in my “in progress” post for March 2021, are shown above along with a detail of the ocean surface.

Dreaming My Dissolution (Detail)

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Acrylic, Japanese paper, gold leaf on canvas (2020)

Size: w 28 x h 40 x d 1.75 inches

This piece is also known as Sea Change (Fall Rich and Strange) — June 2020 for the full image. That title still holds, but when I looked at the painting this morning the words came to me. The new title is dark, but perhaps letting out the dark allows the light to come in.

Lost Spirit

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Coloured gesso, acrylic, graphite, ink on canvas (2022)

Size: w 14″ x h 20″ x d 1.5″

“Przewalski’s horse” is the only truly wild horse in existence. Other horses thought of as wild are in fact feral, according to The Smithsonian. For many years it was extinct in the wild, surviving only in zoos and field stations; its population was at long last successfully reintroduced in the 1990s to its native Mongolia where it is regarded as holy and known as the takhi (meaning spirit, worthy of worship). I picture the takhi roaming from room to room in Palladio’s Villa Poiana, lost between heaven and earth. The image arose from the confluence of two dreams I had 15 years apart, the most recent just a few weeks ago.

Nereids in the Clouds (Detail)

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Acrylic, pastel, ink, Japanese paper on canvas (work in progress, 2022)

Size: w 30″ x h 15″ x d 1.5″

This painting began as a simple study of white clouds across a blue sky, with of course my two Nereid friends present leaping from one to the next. I decided it needed more colour, texture and complexity. The above detail is roughly 6″ x 4″, so I have a bit yet to do.

Nereids and the Ruby Sea Dragon

Posted by npaul on

Acrylic and Japanese paper on canvas (2021)

Size: w 22″ x h 28″ x d 2″

Another detail from a piece I started a while back (see https://npaulartworks.com/2021/03/28/leafy-sea-dragon-detail/). Still in progress.

Nereids Reach the Deep Sea Floor (Detail)

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