Badlands process

Thirty seconds from a blank page to the finished painting. The whole picture is built in grey before any colour goes down.

The last frame of the Badlands time-lapse: the finished painting as the film leaves it — What the film shows

A silent time-lapse, thirty seconds. It opens on the finished painting, then cuts back to white and rebuilds it. The robed figure is drawn first in thin line, then rendered in grey. The hounds arrive next, also in grey, running in from the left. Only around two thirds through does colour appear at all: the robe turns blue over a flat grey sky and a brown ground. The dust, the haze and the pale sun are the last things added.

Everything is resolved in grey first, every value settled, and colour only goes down once the picture already works without it. By the time the blue arrives the painting is essentially finished in another key.

The sky is flat and grey for a long stretch, then the atmosphere comes in late as dust and haze. That is what turns a figure and some dogs into weather.

What it produced

The work →

A robed figure in deep blue, face veiled, one arm held straight out to the side, two collared black hounds running past with their own blurred shadows trailing behind them, a small animal fleeing at the right, pale sun in an orange dust sky

Badlands