Many Mouths to Feed,
Trumpeter Swan
2017
Acrylic on Panel
13.75 x 22
ART OF GEORGE WILLIAM VAN HUMBECK
Oil and Acrylic Painting featuring Landscapes, Nature, and Wildlife
This site introduces to the world the art of George Van Humbeck, artist, painter, naturalist, and teacher. Besides visual links to his art this site also gives details about the process of creating fine works of art for the artist community, beginner or advanced, acrylic or oil painting.
Mind Your Wake,
Common Loons
2020
Acrylic on Panel
16 x 23.5
Private collection of Amber Verkaik and Scott Symonds
The early evening haunting call of the common loon is quintessentially an Ontario cottage country, sound. They are to me majestic with their distinctive body shape, dagger-like beaks, iridescent head, spotted back and banded throat. They are amazing divers; built for it, and for that reason they are clumsy on land. Therefore they must build their nests close to the water's edge. It was this fact that contributed to the idea for this painting. Although the common loon is protected in Canada their numbers are in decline due to habitat loss and nests destroyed by the wake of careless boaters. Please mind your wake.
I would not consider myself a risk taker when it comes to drastic changes to a composition especially near the end of the work. But nevertheless I did take a chance. So imagine this painting without the water reeds. Before the reeds were added I thought the painting was complete. The agitated water consumed so much of my time. I did not realize that it wasn't enough to tell the story. My solution was to keep it simple. Introducing some shoreline in the foreground I believed to be too heavy handed. So I gathered up some water reeds and with the painting laying flat on the floor I tried various arrangements, taking photographs of the most promising. Yes, the real reeds were too big for the scale I decided on but they served a purpose.
So I took the risk and painted them in. I've read horror stories where artists have had to try and remove elements from acrylic paintings like a final glazing that did work. Robert Bateman recounted one such problem. How he ever used a razor blade I'll never know. Thinking back on this situation there are a few suggestions I'd like to share. First, if I was to do this again, I would have scanned the painting before adding the reeds. Secondly I would have used a soft gel acrylic medium first before adding the reeds. Although painting over soft gel is not ideal, it does offer the ability to backtrack. Traditionally, soft gel acts as a buffer between your work of art and the final varnish. This final varnish, exposed to the environment, does get dirty over time and can, in extreme situations, be removed in order to lay down a new clean varnish. The final varnish can be removed carefully with a scrubbing of turpentine (not indoors). The soft gel will act as an extra layer protecting your original work of art. In the chance that I had wanted to remove the reeds, a soft gel layer would have made this easy to do without damaging the underlying work.