Charity Henderson [JR RA 2015]
Untitled 21, 2025
Oil

The artist describes:

“I work primarily in oil paint on dura-lar, a translucent drafting film. My technical process involves scraping the paint around on the dura-lar sheet, giving the works a deconstructed or even pixelated feel. Because dura-lar is translucent, both sides (front and back) can be painted or drawn on. Whatever is painted on the back of the sheet will show through to the front, but with a bit of distance due to the translucency of the sheet.

Both of my works in this show are on dura-lar, but one pushes the double-sided technique more than the other. Untitled 20 is standard to my typical approach, where the background is painted mostly on the back side of the sheet and the figure on the front side, and any drawing is done before painting.

With Untitled 21 (figure in white) the side facing the viewer is the “back” side (there is a fully painted face on the other side.) Because of the translucent nature of dura-lar, the viewed side comes across with a ghost image effect. I have added some additional paint to this side, and then worked it with charcoal pencil as a last step- normally a first stage.