“Into the Blue” - Quadriptych Seascape - Acrylic on Stretched Canvas

Art Musings

Feb 5

Originally published December 11, 2023

I love recycling old paintings, which is exactly what I did with my latest collection. It is a quadriptych painting (a 4-piece painting) of a seascape. Originally it was a heavily textured floral abstract panting that I was given as a gift years ago. However, as I did not have any canvasses and the color scheme of the painting did not match my decor (it was a very vibrant orange and red), I decided to just recycle it. Since the painting had a lot of texture it was not possible to apply layers of gesso and then paint over it. The texture would've shown through as it had many ridges. So I removed the canvas from the wooden frame, bought a 24 inch canvas roll (that was already gessoed), a stapler gun and got to work stretching my own canvasses for the first time. The dimensions of the wooden frame were not conventional, each one with a different length and width, so that plenty of the canvas roll left over that I used to stretch subsequent canvasses.

Stretching canvasses for quadriptych painting

After stretching the canvas over the wooden frame, I applied another layer of gesso and started painting. I decided I wanted to paint a seascape in 4 parts that would work together as a quadriptych and also as individual pieces. The whole set, "Into the Blue" was finished within a couple of weeks as I wanted to leave it loose and dynamic with lots of texture for the waves. THe painting was done with acrylics and water mixable oils for the final details. The dimensions are as follows:

Piece #1: 11.5" x 14.75" x 1" (W x L x D)

Piece #2: 10" x 31" x 1" (W x L x D)

Piece #3: 13.5" x 29.5" x 1" (W x L x D)

Piece #4: 13.5" x 16" x 1" (W x L x D)