Murder on the Orient Express. . .Whacked and Unwrapped WIP2

I must have been mad to decide to paint a window with water droplets on!! It took me absolutely ages to mask each tiny water droplet before I could begin layering on the background glazes but painting around each of them would have taken even longer. In total there are about 7 layers of colour that I have used to create the background but not every colour was put over the whole area.

As I was layering the glazes of colour I tried to build in a suggestion of vertical lines to mirror the lines of the drops of water. To me the vertical lines also convey a rainy depressing feel to the painting pulling you down to the horror that lies on the table.


Kandinsky described Expressionist painting as almost like a window into the soul of the artist. The actual aesthetic appearance of an object being less important than that of the artists own very private vision or emotional response to it. I think this is what really draws me to this type of art. When I paint, although I am not a true Expressionist because I do like to paint realistically, I also strive to convey more than just the ' bricks and mortar' but also the soul deep within. This is why I chose to create this background. Ok, the death of my chocolate orange is, in part, a joke and is intended to make us laugh but within the context of the story it is a deeply serious matter. My See Eye A agent if still alive might have been able to lead Hercule to the murderer. His death has now set the investigation back weeks and will cause terror, horror and depression in the fruit world. Why do we then laugh at it? We laugh because we react to the deep emotion and ok this time its just a chocolate orange so we can breathe a sigh of relief and laugh but we only laugh because we know what our emotions would be if it were a loved one or someone we know. To me Expressionistic art feeds off this powerful trait of human nature. Does it really matter what I, the artist feel as I am painting ? To me the success of this type of art lies in the fact that we are all humans with powerful emotions and will each be able to connect in some way with the subject matter.

Ona