How a mixed-media painting is built, layer by layer

A mixed-media painting is not made in a single pass. It accumulates. Paper is torn and glued, charcoal is worked in and lifted out, oil and raw pigment are laid over the top, and the whole thing is reconsidered until a figure surfaces and then half-dissolves back into the material. What you finally see is the record of that accumulation - a surface with a history inside it.

This is how I work in the studio, and it is worth describing plainly, because a mixed-media surface rewards a collector who knows what they are looking at. Once you can read the layers, a painting stops being a flat image and becomes a section through time.

Starting with the ground

Everything begins with the support and its ground. Before any image exists, I build a surface that already has incident in it: torn papers glued down, a wash of pigment, a tone that is never quite even. This is technique mixte in its most literal sense - the mixing starts before the subject arrives.

A worked ground matters because it decides how everything above it will sit. A flat white surface gives the later marks nowhere to catch. A ground with grain and edge means that when charcoal is dragged across it, the black breaks up, and when oil is laid over it, the colour pools and skips. The accidents of the ground become the character of the finished work.

Collage: torn paper as drawing

Collage in my paintings is not decoration stuck onto a picture. The torn edges of paper are themselves a form of drawing - hard lines the hand could not make, contours that arrive by tearing rather than by describing. A glued edge can become the ridge of a nose or the boundary of a shoulder before I have drawn a single mark.

Reading collage in a finished work means looking for these buried edges. Some are covered by later layers and survive only as a slight change of level under the paint. Others are left exposed. Where an artist chooses to hide or reveal a torn edge tells you a great deal about how the picture was thought through.

Charcoal: building and unbuilding the figure

Then comes the charcoal. This is where the figure begins to emerge and, just as often, to retreat. I darken a passage until it is nearly buried, then lift the light back out with a cloth or an eraser. A head appears, is lost, and appears again slightly changed. If you want a fuller account of how this medium behaves, I have written separately about charcoal as a fine-art medium.

The reason for working this way is that I am not trying to fix a subject in place. All my work is a search for an earlier subject, one that shows itself through viewpoints that converge into a single prism. Charcoal lets me keep searching on the same surface, because it can be added and subtracted endlessly without the picture closing down.

Oil and raw pigment: weight and light

Oil and raw pigment come last and carry the weight. Raw pigment, used more or less dry, gives a matt, powdery intensity that reads differently from oil straight from the tube - it sits in the surface rather than on it. Oil brings the deep, wet darks and the few passages of real light. Together they resolve the picture without fully explaining it.

You can see this logic across different subjects. In a landscape or abstraction such as La mer or En foret, the pigment layers do most of the atmospheric work, while in a head like Portrait rouge the final oil marks are what make the face turn and hold a viewer's eye.

How to read the surface as a collector

When you stand in front of a mixed-media painting, a few habits help you read it well.

• Look raking, not straight on. View the surface at a low angle so the light skims across it. Ridges, torn edges and layers of pigment reveal themselves in relief that a straight view flattens.
• Find the oldest layer. Trace back to what was laid down first. The earliest marks often govern the whole composition even when they are nearly covered.
• Notice where the figure dissolves. The passages where a form gives way to raw material are usually the ones the artist cared about most.
• Trust the depth. A surface built in layers has an optical depth a printed image cannot reproduce. That depth is much of what you are acquiring.

Frequently asked questions

What does mixed media, or technique mixte, actually mean?

It means more than one material has been combined in a single work. In my paintings that means collage, charcoal, oil and raw pigment worked together in layers, rather than a picture made in one medium alone.

Is a mixed-media painting less durable than an oil painting?

Not when it is properly made and framed. Each layer is allowed to settle, and the finished work is protected appropriately for its materials. Collage and charcoal elements are stable when cared for sensibly.

Why do the figures in the work look unfinished?

They are resolved rather than fully described. Leaving a form to dissolve into the material is a deliberate choice - it keeps the search for the subject visible instead of closing it off with a tidy outline.

Can I see the layers in a photograph?

Only partly. Photography flattens the relief and loses the matt-to-wet contrast between pigment and oil. A mixed-media surface is best understood in person, which is why studio viewings are worth arranging.

The best way to understand how these layers behave is to see one in the light. You can explore the collection or read about acquiring work directly from the studio in Lille.