white,” she says. She uses Golden
acrylic paints and mediums, and
punctuates her palette with Holbein
Acryla Gouache colors. “They’re milky
and vibrant, in brighter shades than
any other brand I’ve used.”
The birchwood panels on which
Duncan paints boost the vividness
of her acrylics. She rarely works on
canvas. “When I paint on a canvas,
it looks kind of dull and flat,” she
says. “Maybe the canvas absorbs more
of the pigment, but on the birchwood,
it sits on the surface nicely.”COMBINING CLARITY
AND SPONTANEITY
Of her beachscapes, Duncan says,
“Initially, I began with an all-around
loose approach.” She referenced her
own photos and abstracted them,
breaking them down into basic
shapes, mixing in intuitive marks and
applying an entirely new color palette.
“As the series evolved, I homed in onspecific elements of the scene and
sharpened them, which brought a nice
contrast of tightness amid painterly
whimsical layers,” she says.
She juxtaposes sharp detail
with spontaneous marks and busy
commotion with open fields of color.
A painting idea comes first, before
she sets out to take photographs and
starts sketching. “I like to nail down
the right proportions within the
initial sketch, but then layer about
three abstracts underneath,” Duncan
says. (See “Underlying Interest,”
page 69, for more details about
the artist’s approach.) “Sometimes
these abstracts create happy layered
accidents that are revealed sporadi-
cally in the final product, and other
times there’s no trace of them.”
Once Duncan determines that there
are enough interesting foundational
layers, she blocks in the light and
shadow shapes using a larger brush,
and then switches to a finer point totighten details. “After enough informa-
tion is provided, I like to take a wide
brush and water down the paint,
leaving very little pigment,” she says.
“This creates a nice wash, which
pushes the subject back into space and
brings the closer subjects forward.”
After an ongoing push-and-pull tech-
nique, Duncan fine-tunes each scene
to “a finished, sharp completeness.”SOUGHT-AFTER STYLE
Experimentation with new brushes
and media helped Duncan’s work
evolve into the “pixilated composi-
tions” that have become the artist’s
signature. “Angled and squared
brushes naturally make more
rectangular shapes, and acrylic andRosemary Blooms (acrylic on birchwood panel,
36x48) is based on a beach town in Florida that
Duncan’s family frequents most summers. “It’s
such a nostalgic place that always evokes fond
memories,” she says.66 Artists Magazine May 2019