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You have a large oddly-shaped canvas in your exhibition what is the reason for this?

All my paintings are full of details and are best viewed close up. A cursory glance from a distance may well miss some of the content. But the strange shape of the canvas invites you to come in close and inspect the tiny images inside the rain drops.

What are the images inside the raindrops?

In this case the tiny images form a story about a dog. They are a series of drawings I made a few years ago as a proposal to a publisher for a children's story. This is the first time I've tried out this idea on a canvas and I wanted to see if it works.

Surely you haven't painted all these details by hand?

No, both the orange and the two green canvases are formed from large giclee prints which I then stretch onto specially prepared backgrounds. I am experimenting with this to work out the best way to do it.              

                                       

First I draw up the shapes I want and then I cut them out of plywood. The canvas giclee is then cut to size and fixed to the wooden template with staples. Lastly the two shaped canvases are fixed to the central image.

Don't people think that giclee is somehow cheating?

             

                                       

Well, this is true. But giclee also gives you the opportunity to experiment and make top level changes to your work. For example I can combine images from different works, change the overall colour and select only certain details to work with. It suits my way of working, but I can see that artists who use thick impasto paint may find the results unsatisfactory as it is not as good at reproducing this type of texture.

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© All these images are the intellectual property of Alan Kestner 2018 and cannot be copied or reproduced without his express permission.