Friday Night with Victoria Wallace – March 9

(Submitted by Ingrid Mueller)

Victoria Wallace has an impressive CV and a list of exhibitions longer than your arm, but what is most impressive is her signature technique she has taught at Haliburton School of Art, and other workshops called 21^st Century Grisaille.

Victoria has created some wonderful work in a variety of mediums. Oil was her original medium of choice and still is when she works in encaustic, but the technique she demonstrated tonight requires acrylic paint.

She has modernized Grisaille and developed a technique that achieves stunning results.  Grisaille is described as painting in grey monotones, often used in paintings of stone sculpture.  Victoria has taken the technique a step further. Using dry medium like charcoal, one sketches a scene or subject on the canvas of paper. In order to seal the charcoal to eliminate smudging, you paint the drawing with acrylic medium.  She notes that ALL of the lines must be coated with medium, as the black will, otherwise, darken the colour you paint on top. It’s much like doing an underpainting without using black. Once this stage has dried (pretty fast because it’s acrylic) one paints a wash of desired colour over the painting. The results are impressive, leaving the painting with an almost ghostly, soft appearance.

Victoria promised to send us an image of this painting once finished.  We look forward to seeing it.

You may visit this website to see more work by Victoria Wallace: http://www.victoriartist.com/