Description
An elegant, beautifully framed watercolour adorned with glowing gold leaf, by award-winning Kenyan artist Karen Laurence-Rowe who has won the overall top award at the David Shepherd Wildlife Artist of the Year Exhibition in London twice, and continues to excel in her field. Below is a humorous account by Karen herself about the creating of this painting that very nearly wasn’t……
“After six long days of hard graft I was just preparing the glue ground in order to paste on the gold leaf when to my horror I upturned a whole pot of glue on the bottom quarter of the painting! Panic ….along with much swearing!
If only there was a video of me desperately trying to wipe off the glue as it ran off the painting on to the desk and dripped to the floor… Suddenly I find myself with my feet sticking to the floor, and wads of tissue paper now stuck to my hands whilst the spilled glue sank quickly in to the paper … All the the while, yours truly is crossing her legs whilst dying for a pee and not being able to do anything about it! You can imagine the mess … !
Thinking I might be able to save it I left it to dry overnight and crossed my fingers. The next day – it hadn’t dried and I made the decision to start again and NOT to use gold leaf or glue on the next. Another six days go by and I paint the same image in blue as opposed to ‘glue’. This painting I have donated to the conservation of giraffes but the original painting is beckoning … can it be saved?
With nothing to lose I scrub at the glue patches with nail varnish remover and when that doesn’t work, with surgical spirit – eureka! It does the trick; I am able to progress – and this is the golden result.”
