Acrylic Paintings on Black Masonite

I grew concerned about the fragility of the drawings on paper and the fact that they had to be protected with glass, which obscured some of the hard-won nuances. While searching for a way to get a texture in acrylic paint that would evoke the grainy luminosity of the drawings, I stumbled on the idea of floating thin washes of opaque color over a surface on which I had created a heavy, suede-like "tooth" with black gesso and a paint roller. The wash of lighter, colored paint pooled in the tiny hollows of the dark gessoed surface as it dried, creating a variation on both the rubbed pastels and the charcoals - here the lights settled in the troughs of the surface grain and the shadows broke through the crests.