Ghost (2021) Original Acrylic Painting by Stephen Whatcott

Visible only faintly through the expansive black field of Ghost are the pentimenti: traces of earlier shapes, decisions, and compositional choices that have since been painted over.

Those ghosted marks of earlier compositional choices are visible as textural shifts within, or underneath, the black. This lies at the conceptual heart of the painting. The knife-worked surface makes those pentimenti subtle, requiring close inspection or raking light to fully register.

This work inverts the off-white dominant field entirely. The composition has been worked through its various forms before allowing the black to almost swallow the painting whole. The off-white acts as a glimmer of light in an otherwise dark mass, as the black has cut in again and again.

At this scale, the near-total black reads as genuinely engulfing rather than as a contained incident. This is a different physical experience to more light-dominant paintings.

Materials used:

Acrylic on canvas

Details:

• Acrylic painting on Canvas
• One of a kind artwork
• Size: 100 x 100 x 5cm (unframed) / 100 x 100cm (actual image size)
• Ready to hang
• Signed on the front
• Style: Organic
• Subject: Abstract and non-figurative