62 Artists Magazine May 2020
Creating Marks
and Shapes
Wright primarily uses Golden heavy-
body acrylics—she likes their creamy
consistency and intense color—and
Liquitex’s brilliant blue. She doesn’t
use fluid acrylics often, but has taken
to the fluid phthalo turquoise she
received from one of her three daugh-
ters as a gift. “Fluid acrylics are great
to use at the beginning of a painting,”Wright says she’ll grab
inspiration from any-
where—“in this case,
from my daughter’s
discarded physics
notebook,” she says of
Range of Motion (acrylic,
collage, graphite and oil
pastel on paper, 26x40).
“Her notes, with their
drawings and ter-
minology, caught my
attention, and I ended
up adding some pieces
of the notebook as
collage—painting over
parts to incorporate
them—and referenced
this in the title.”Wright says. She sprays them to
encourage movement on the paper.
Wright steers clear of black and
most earth-toned paints, removing
them from her standard acrylic palette
in favor of bolder, purer hues. “I love
all the cadmiums,” she says. “There
isn’t a painting I create these days that
doesn’t feature at least two of them.”
She rarely uses flat brushes in her
watercolor work, but they’re her go-tobrushes when working in acrylic
to achieve the shapes she wants.
“I’ll use a round brush with acrylic
for making lines,” Wright says. “I also
paint frequently with a palette knife
to scrape out lines and shapes. I’ll
use whatever will give me the shape
I want, including sticks.”
She enjoys adding marks using
other media, including any kind of
pencil, from water-soluble to woodless.Syncopation (acrylic,
graphite, watercolor
and oil pastel on paper,
26x40) was painted
just after Wright fi nished
Range of Motion (above),
and she considers it
a “pure celebration”
of color. “It began with
a similar, very crowded
still life setup,” she says.
“In addition to my usual
repertoire of media—
graphite, oil pastel
and watercolor sticks—
I used acrylic ‘skins’—thin
sheets of acrylic paint
that had dried on my
palette paper.”LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST
AT CAROLYNMARSHALLWRIGHT.COM.