Acrylic, food coloring, and salt on canvas

2022

This is one of my favorite paintings and it was pretty much created by accident. I covered the canvas with a mix of blue and white paint and then spread it around with a sponge roller. My intent was to create a bold and textured background so once this layer of paint dried, I applied light green paint to one corner and a reddish brown color to the opposite corner. I knew the colors clashed horribly but my intent was to use the roller to spread the colors around so that I could apply other colors on top once this layer dried. I was overzealous in using the roller and ended up spreading too much paint, completely obscuring the blue background. I decided to start over once the paint dried and chose to coat the entire surface with the reddish brown color. I didn’t like this at all so in an attempt to remove some of the paint, I sprayed water over the canvas and used the sponge roller to remove it. I filled another spray bottle with water and several drops of purple and blue food coloring and then sprayed the entire canvas until the surface was completely soaked. The water, food coloring, and paint layer were blending together and creating a gooey mess so I placed several pairs of disposable wood chopsticks in the puddle I made. The chopsticks began to soak up a lot of the water and pigment but there was way too much so I used paper towels to soak up more of the water. Once the canvas was no longer soaking wet, I sprinkled chunks of salt over the remaining damp areas. I don’t know what I was expecting because I’ve never tried this before on a canvas with acrylic paint. I’ve used salt on watercolor paintings to absorb some of the surface moisture but found out that too much water breaks down the salt which recrystallizes once the water evaporates. I expected the same thing to happen here so as the water evaporated over the next several hours, I kept adding more and more salt. The salt was displacing the pigment in the water but I also noticed that the water had broken through the reddish brown layer to reveal the other colors I had used earlier. One corner was turning a murky green and the center was turning a dark blue. The other corner with the original layer of red paint was becoming darker. After several more hours I removed the soaked chopsticks which left behind puddles in the shapes of the sticks. I left the painting to dry while I went to work and when I got back in the evening, I was very surprised at the outcome. Some of the salt had dissolved and recrystallized which made the canvas sparkle. The larger salt chunks had absorbed the reddish brown pigment and now looked like tiny rocks. The areas where the chopsticks had been turned a copperish color and stood out against the rest of the colors on the canvas. The edges were still reddish brown but the center now had a gradient of green to blue to red. The overall composition looked like stains left behind from pieces of rusty metal so I decided to name this piece accordingly.

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