project: double apron painter’s smock

i used to work in the kitchen of a busy lunch place in a college town. we wore aprons. i loved my apron. it cradled my unbra-d breasts, it gave me a waist, it wrapped around my capacious hips. i looked great.

and i don’t look good in clothes. i only look good naked.

be that as it may, you can understand why my apron has been the model of many of my clothing styles ever since.

it’s practical. it keeps everything covered, it holds everything close to the body so you don’t dip anything into anything. it’s a sheath, like most elegant evening gowns, hugging tightly to every curve and giving way where room is needed.

so when i decided that in order to protect my sister’s expensive clothes (see my travel blog) i was going to need an artist’s smock to cover everything i could think of to wear during a breezy stormy residency in the west of ireland this fall.

i will be wearing a silk undershirt (mine), a t-shirt and cardigan and a sweater over that (my sister’s), and there’ll be a turf fire burning in the center of the cottage, and endless cups of hot tea, but an extra layer wrapped tight won’t be amiss.

i happened to find in the attic some fancy upholstery cotton. 2 yards. and i found somewhere else a similarly busy but smaller scale mess of quasi paisley brushed cotton of a not quite as heavy weight. also 2 yards. they both look brownish green when seen at a distance.

i envisioned an apron tied in back. and another apron, put on backwards and tied in front. but since i wanted protection for my shoulders and arms, i needed sleeves and a neckline.

i’d seen something in some historical costume picture book, a continuous yoke that went from wrist to wrist, making the sleeve. the neck was cut out of it, the body of the shirt was gathered into it. it was a powerfully simple idea.

so, this continuous yoke. and stitched onto that, the bib of the apron, back and front.

i made the yoke 16″ wide, because my fingers spread to 8″ and i doubled that.

i cut out an 8″ hole for the neck and put facing on that.

i made the bib 15″ wide, the distance across the top of my chest. i made it 15″ long, to the top of my hips (because i don’t like anything around my waist, i make my waistlines at my hips. just facing facts).

then i made the skirt another 25″, to mid calf, and wide enough to wrap around my hips and almost meet at back (and i think i misjudged that, because i had to do considerable messing around with the width of the skirt when i was piecing it together).

the bib has a triangle piece on each side that wraps around to the back. and there are pockets. and possibly cuffs. and ties.

so i figured out that i liked the idea of making a panel the width of the bib but the length of the whole bib-and-skirt. so 40″ by 15″. it suited the patterns of the fabrics. so i cut out a middle panel of both fabrics. and then the two sides of the skirt, and then the two triangles. and then i mixed them so that when i wrapped and tied the whole thing, the same fabric would be on the tie-ing part of the skirt, and the different fabric would be on the bib, a slimming thing.

and then i did a lot of pinning and measuring, as usual. and then i sewed everything together using wide seams and double-turned wide hems, hoping to avoid that rolling-hem problem i keep having with my clothes.

the hole in this entire idea is the fact that the sleeves don’t meet the bib. the shoulder yoke meets the bib, fine, it’s sewn right to the bib. but when i stitched the sleeves together i only closed the fabric to around the elbow.

the sleeve hangs open from the upper arm to the bib, about 6″.

what to do? if i close it to the underarm it will be way too tight to accommodate all the clothing i plan to have underneath the smock in october. i can’t attach it to the triangle of the bib because the bibs wrap around the body. the front is not joined to the back below the yoke.

so i may have to leave the hole. but i think that might be okay. it doesn’t gap or pouch when i have my arms down, and it makes the whole thing easy to get on, just reach my arms into the sleeves and pop my head thru and tie the ties.

there’s a question of pockets. the ties will cross any pockets that are on the bib front. and the pockets will mar the lovely line of the bib itself. i could put them on the edges of the skirts near the ties, and have them ride my hips. i’m still not sure.

here are my drawings and some preliminary measurements. you probably can’t see them very well.

sodium alginate as a water-based resist

in recent posts (the prior two i think) i experimented to find a cheap water-based resist for silk painting. you can get little tubes or bottles of proprietary resist from the dye houses, but they’re way fucking expensive, and i’ll be damned if i’m going to be held hostage to somebody’s formula. grrr.

so i thought about it, and looked it up, and found recipes for rice starch paste and other things that i didn’t like the look of. and i cast my eye on my little unused bag of sodium alginate. i had it because all the books said to have it. to thicken the dye. but in silk painting you want watery dyes. thick dyes are for like painting dye directly on cotton fabrics. for silk you use a resist line.

of course, this is mere tradition. you can use what you like on what you like. that’s art. the question is rather of the integrity of your materials. how long will your work last is more important than what brand of paint you used.

so i’ve developed a secret recipe for sodium alginate water-based resist that you can have FOR FREE.

that’s right, knowledge should be free. free for all to use as best they can.

using the recipe for print paste that i probably found on paula burch’s hand-dyeing website, or mostly using the recipe, because i am constitutionally barred from following  recipes exactly, here’s a go at remembering how i did it

i only made up half a batch at a time, too, not to waste any.

1 tsp sodium alginate

couple of splashes rubbing alcohol

mix alginate with alcohol to moisten.

1/4c hot water

1/2 a teaspoon urea

pinch calgon

dissolve urea and calgon in hot water, then add alginate/alcohol mix and stir until well blended. might as well make it in a blender, except in these amounts it would be ridiculous.

basically, follow print paste recipe except double or fourple the amount of alginate, then add alcohol and calgon for various reasons et voila.

it thins with water to go on with a brush – as noflow or antifusant.

it goes into a little squeeze bottle with a tip and comes out in thin lines that resist the spread of dye.

and i save big time.

one bottle of brand name water-based resist $8.75 for 3.5 oz

one bottle of antifusant $5.48 for 8 oz

one pound of sodium alginate $20. guess how many 3.5 oz bottles you can make up with a pound of alginate measured out a teaspoon at a time.

i’m keeping some in the fridge because i forgot about it, but one of these days real soon now i’ll take it out and see if it’s still good, or has it gone runny and gloppy. it’s got alcohol in it, so maybe it’ll last awhile.

even the $9 for 3.5 oz goes bad after awhile.

so i’m crowing.

now, i’m certain i’ve just reinvented the wheel. dyers have undoubtedly known about this for donkeys’ years.

but it’s news to me.

i just hate paying for the convenience of someone making it up for me. i hate paying the 10,000% profit that some corporation is making just because i don’t know how to do it myself.

that’s another kind of slavery. so here’s a way to get around buying one more little thing you need to make art.

it’s all part of a conspiracy to hobble the artist. artists traditionally made it all themselves, from powdering the rocks to building the stretchers. and more and more, art stores are marketing to artists as if art is just a hobby, as if convenience was the thing, as if we were too damned busy making a living so we could afford to go to an art supply store and plunk down a couple of hundred dollars for a bunch of things we have no idea how to make.

i prefer to make them. and the knowledge i’ve gained enables me to make art out of anything. cue evil laugh.

more experimenting

that strip of linen got dyed and washed out, and lost some of the red.

then i did up some sodium alginate and made up a paint mix of purple, and overpainted paisley over the ends of the linen strip. and batched that and washed it out.

then i stretched it and made up some super-thick (4 times the recommended amount for print paste), put it into a water-based resist squeeze bottle, and put patterns on the middle of the linen strip.

then i made up a paint mix without alginate, a thin paint, and put it all around the resist lines.

by god they held. washed and all. bled like hell when i rinsed it but i saw it was well resisted.

so then i did the ultimate resist test. i got out a silk scarf and stretched it, and used the alginate as a resist, and put in a nice setting earth scene. some fine detail lines. some smeared goo, some smeared goo moistened with a wet finger.

the alginate worked very well as a resist, if the line is thick enough, which it will work with a surprisingly thin line. as for the smeared stuff, it acted just like no-flow.

so i think i’m on to something here.

because all these products are proprietary, thus secret, thus costly. costlier than it is to make them.

i’m going to continue to test this alginate resist in the following days and weeks.

i’m so happy. tapioca starch didn’t work at all. rice starch is a pain, flour starch i haven’t tried but i don’t want to steam it into my silk and then try to get it off. alginate might work marvelously. let’s see how it steams.

experimenting with dyes

i’m preparing for a residency in the west of ireland in october, see here. at the moment i’m chronicling airfares, but earlier on i have loads of considerations about what to take with me in order to make as much art as possible in 3 weeks. the lists are entertaining, to me. and i’ll pull them up when the time comes to pack and most of my work will have been done for me.

the reason i’m preparing so far ahead of time is that there are several new techniques and methods i want to explore while i’m there, and i need to learn the basics now so i won’t waste time once i’m on site.

the thing i’m doing new is to go completely back to basics, which is the same thing as saying doing it on the way cheap.

i have a weight requirement for my luggage, and i’m only bringing one bag, tho as big a one as they allow. so everything i need for three weeks of art has to fit inside it.

so i have to rethink tubed oil paints, tubed watercolors, tubed acrylics. what a lot of lead-lined tubes for the guys in security to tut-tut over.

i’m bringing pigments in little plastic containers. and i’m bringing most of my mediums and will mix them as needed. some of the media i want to bring they won’t let me. beeswax, turpentine, alcohol. i might be able to slip orange oil past them.

this is revolutionary, for me. i no longer need rely on buying something in order to paint. hell, i can paint something everlasting with a brick and some grease.

and that’s easily 20 pounds of luggage just in the tubes i’d have to bring.

why duplicate things when i can bring the raw ingredients and make my own?

thus said, i have a lot of raw ingredients where until now i had a lot of proprietary mixtures with no ingredient labels. so i’m laving to reinvent the wheel in a lot of ways.

for instance, how to make my own resist. i want a water based resist, but i don’t want one that costs $8 for 4.ounces. it sets me off; let’s not go there.

but the old traditional japanese resist is a big pain in the ass to make. so i’m looking for substitutes.

a few weeks ago i experimented with tapioca starch resist, and thankfully didn’t write any of it down for your delectation. i did, however, make a gooey mess and never did get all the tapioca out of my silk. didn’t resist worth a damn, either.

today my subject is sodium alginate. not exactly algae, but really slimy and thick. you use it to thicken your dye so that you can paint it on as if it was watercolor, and it won’t run and bleed as much as it would if it weren’t thickened. i’ve never actually used it before, because i mostly have used low-immersion scrunch dyeing. but i have a project in mind for a set of placemats that are paintings of the landscape around cill rialaig, which is the name of the place where i’ll be staying.

so i made up a batch of so-called paste, which was goopy but thinner than i can use for resist lines. i’ll have to make it twice as thick to put it in a tube and squirt out straight lines. so i mixed it with red, yellow and blue instead, and used all the chemicals – soda ash, urea, calgon, salt, alcohol, and dye powder, and used three different brushes to dip out of three different bowls, and made an abstract design on a piece of linen i’d cut off the 6-yard roll i’m taking with me to ireland.

having done that, and seeing that the fabric was sort of wet thru, i rolled it up in a plastic garbage bag and sat it out in the sun on top of the plastic trash can, where it will sizzle and steam.

it’s 80 in the house – atlanta at the end of may – so i uncovered four high-count cotton pillow cases i’d been saving, and planned to use up the rest of the dye.

i couldn’t throw away all that leftover dye, and because it had soda ash in it, i couldn’t save it, because the ash just eats away at the dye’s dyeing power. something.

so. i scrunched up all the pillow cases from one end to the other, and then folded them in half and stuck them in the corners of a plastic tub, all folded and facing the same way. i’m not very neat at this. there’s no point.

then i added more water to the yellow and poured it into the middle of the tub where all four points meet. it was very grainy at the bottom (i don’t mix very well, and i don’t use exact amounts of anything) so i made sure to put that in the very middle on the theory that it was concentrated dye that hadn’t broken up and dissolved. or else it was urea. or soda ash.

then i poured the red in around the yellow. i kind of forgot to put any extra water in to the red, but it went around twice. then i did put water into the blue, and put that around the outside.

at that point, it looked colorful, but i knew it was only mostly on the surface, and i needed to add plenty of clear water to make it spread and do wonderful color things.

so cup after cup of water from the sink (chlorine from the water plus iodine from the salt, what chemistry there is in dyeing) until the pillow cases started to float. then a grocery bag on top of the fabric, and bricks on top of that, squeeze all the air out maybe, and let it sit for 24 hours. at above 70. which it’s been for a month now.

you should see the weeding i have to do in the back yard.

on this first day of experimenting, i’m just making sure i’ve got the basics of plant dyeing. later i’ll have to figure out the formula to dye silk, another learning curve among many.

the next thing i have to do is work out whether and how i can use sodium alginate to resist dye.

this linen i’ve got? i bought it on impulse at binders years ago, when i had a day job. i thought it was on sale for $6/yard. i paid $6/square foot and gulped. but i had credit…

and it sat there. it’s always been too expensive to use for the kinds of paintings people were just going to hang on their walls and look at. something.

in the meantime i reused old canvases, and i used up a roll of raw canvas given to me by my brothers.

in the meantime, the cats slept on my roll of linen, sharpened their claws on it, got their fur deeply interwoven in the fabric.

but it’s 6 yards.

and the things i can do with six yards of canvas.

clothing.

dyed and then painted things

bases for encaustic paintings

oil paintings

pastel paintings

acrylic paintings

art quilts

placemats and napkins

just like using pigments and all the various media you can make paint with, i can use my linen as the material with which i make whatever art appeals to me at the moment.

this is artistic freedom.

encaustic: blue marble

pastel underpainting

1st layers of wax, burned in

2nd layers of wax, to be burned

detail showing thick impasto of whites, striving for texture but not yet melted

i’m having a funny moment. im sitting here at 2 in the morning typing in the dark, and for the longest time i could only sit here with hands poised above the keyboard and staring into space, because i couldn’t think of anything to say.

not like i haven’t been planning what to say on my blog while i’m standingi around doing my art work. i do that a whole lot, having always had a camera and mike in my head. but i couldn’t figure out what impulse to follow into a blog entry, and couldn’t figure out which of my many blogs to post to, and then got lost in wondering which of the many blogs is more me? is it the cancer blog? is it doing art? right now it’s alot about traveling.

i guess what i’m trying to do is write missives, like i used to do when i’d go travelling. originally it started as 25 page letters to a friend. i knew a girl who wrote home on carbon paper, keeping a copy for herself as her journal. once the internet got here my letters turned into emails, and spammed emails at that. i sent them to anyone i had in my address book, and didn’t really care if i was burdening them with an hour and a half of reading. nobody let me know they didn’t read my emails. and now i don’t have to offend anyone with another wave of revulsion at seeing an email from me, because you have to search for my blog entries to find them, and that means you’re asking for it.

but my train of thought has been interrupted again by a funny moment, a pre-epileptic-like frozen gaze where my mind is active but my body is drooling. odd.

i’m working up a whole set of planet paintings. i want to do a long thin panel of moons in their phases, and not necessarily the moon we look at. i’ve been getting interested in parts of our planet that don’t look familiar. antarctica without ice. the arctic as an inland sea. i’ve been spending a lot of time on websites about the poles. fascinating stuff. antarctica without ice is like some fantasy novel’s map. i want to name the bits and pieces things like dragon ridge and silent wood. i want to do mars, tho the color scheme is challenging – red. red is challenging. blue and green are not. gray is not.  but i guess i lie. gray is every bit as challenging as red. blue and green are not. white and blue are not. and black.

i’ve noticed a very strange effect in melting my white wax paint. i’m using titanium white in beeswax, softened with orange oil instead of melted on a hotplate, and fused with a heatlamp.

note the bubbling of the whites and grays, and how the white has pulled away from the blue

i don’t put white on until i have to. white takes the longest to melt, and melts at a higher temperature, so everything around it is already molten and flowing  by the time white looses its structure. white is trouble. even a little white mixed in with some other color.

what happens is this. when i heat up the layers of wax i’ve been laying down for awhile, and there’s white in the paint layer, it’s as if the wax underneath the white layer (or two) was liquid and the white was slowly melting on top of an already melted mess of wax with some other pigment in it, and when it gets to a point of moltenness the fabric of the white suddenly tears, gets holes in it that spread. kind of like crawling, when a glaze beads up on the surface underneath. it’s a crawl in the direction of the heat source, and if not noticed, which is easy because it’s very glary, the crawl can become a flow and then a churn and then you have uniformly mixed color and that’s bad.

the crawl is interesting. i can’t control it. not that it can’t be controlled, but it seems to be because the white was heated maybe too fast. if it’s deliberately heated fast, the wax surges away from the heat, swelling into rings, and the white just bursts apart. if i back away the moment the white starts to split then it’s not too bad, but that part tends to stay liquid longer because it’s white and the wax retains the extra heat needed to melt it.

i have no idea why i’m getting a crawl with white. i see no mention of this problem on the encaustic forum, so i’ve got to think that it’s my method. which means, working with solvents. which is universally frowned upon, even tho it means you can paint with brushes just like you would with oil paint, with ample time to do all the brushwork things that makes oil paint so satisfying, but with the magical texture of wax.

so i’m thinking that my orange oil might be the problem. i’m going to experiment some more.

once i figured out it was me, i whipped out my experimental painting and did some samples. curiously, i couldn’t duplicate the results. so i launched into the next painting, and when it came time to add the white, i started getting the effect again even in very low concentrations of white.

more detail showing texture, this made either with a patted brush or my finger – you won’t see the tearing of the white until i burn in this layer, tomorrow.

i was trying to document this problem so that maybe someone could tell me what’s going on. so i tried to take movies i could put up on you tube, but all they showed was the heatlamp glaring into the surface of the painting. i want to show the liquifying of the wax and the point at which the white starts tearing like ripe pantyhose. but i can’t do that very well, apparently, and i can’t describe it. and since this last layer of white was mixed with mineral spirits instead of orange oil, and since i already released and burned off any remaining orange oil when i burned the first layer in, i will, i feel sure, be able to figure out if i’ve got a d-limonene problem, or does white separate with any solvent.

my d-limonene problem. i made myself sick using turpentine as a solvent already. nausea, vomiting, ill for a night and queasy thereafter for awhile. so i switched to orange oil. because mineral spirits are petroleum products, thus they cause cancer. d-limonene is gras – generally recognized as safe, which means non-toxic. there was some concern about effects to the kidneys in mice, but later studies indicated cancer-fighting properties of orange oil, and it’s being investigated as a prophylactic supplement to prevent recurrence.

i’m breathing in small quantities of a cancer fighter, how’s that for cool? because yeah i’ve already had cancer and so it’s kind of reassuring to know i’m not deliberately courting it after the disastrous first date but rather running with the antidote.

i’ve been up for awhile. jim’s asleep, allison’s still at work. did i mention i have a full house at the moment? my kid’s here, part time, and her kid’s here sometime, and so i don’t have three minutes to myself, so i’m up writing while jim sleeps. it’s spring, so my days are spent at least thinking about outside, and i’m furiously finishing this encaustic and maybe one more before perhaps turning my attention to showing them, which means work, but maybe someone else’s work. i need to turn my attention to fabric for awhile. i have to figure out how to dye silk using mx fiber reactive dyes, which is just a vinegar recipe rather than a soda ash recipe, but i still have to figure it out and get my learning curve down before i go off to the back of beyond and not know what i’m doing and make a balls of it.

pair of beauties 2

a word on encaustic painting. a word on painting with wax. a word on the cold wax method of encaustic. i have found that i have a really hard time applying wax paint if it’s at all waxy. but once i cut it enough it becomes like oil paint, like butter. come to think of it, i can’t handle spreading butter cold, either. there’s got to be spreadability before i’m happy. and correct me if i’m wrong, because i haven’t tried encaustic the regular way yet, but you can’t get a buttery application with molten wax. whereas i can paint with it. with brushes, and go back, and blend. i have maybe ten minutes before enough citrus oil  has evaporated that the wax becomes tacky.

indeed, you can see the reference photos tacked up onto the background right there. just like old fashioned paste-up mechanicals that nobody uses anymore. anyway, ten minutes of working time is as good as or better than acrylic and watercolor, tho nothing to the hours of working time when you’re working in oil paint.

i love to paint. it’s a physical thing. well-being floods thru me when i’ve got a brush in my hand. i know, it’s sexist. but the charge is there. but i really LOVE to paint with wax. it’s light and fluffy, it’s smooth, it stays where you put it, it has texture.

texture. this is why i dare to include wax encaustic on panel in among my fabric art blog entries, because it’s so tactile. and the thing about fabric is that it’s tactile. it’s something you just have to go up and feel. and wax is exactly the same. it’s three dimensional, and there’s a surface that feels marvelous next to your skin. and god the colors. wax holds pigment unlike other media. watercolor doesn’t have depth. acrylic smells bad so i never use it, oil takes forever to dry but smells great, pastels ah that’s a different paragraph. oil has the translucency as well as the impasto and so does acrylic, but there’s that dimensional thing. you can make wax thick, and it looks thick. you can see down into it. you can get lost in it.

detail of the moon

maybe later on you can see down into it. i’m actually painting rather thickly on this. with a palette knife. and now that i’m using white in the colors, it’s opaque. i’ve been using up whatever color is left on the palette by mixing in the next color, so i’ll have a batch of paint that goes progressively brown or blue or white.

i’m going back and forth between palette knife and paintbrush. wax scumbles really well, and a palette knife is great for scraping and smudging, tho lousy for detail, at least at my skill level, which is only practiced beginner.

i worked out the details with pastel in the earlier stage of this painting, which is 48×54 on panel. i’ve never had any luck with pastels, but as a way to block in the color it can’t be beat, except it didn’t like my surface very much. too hard, and too smooth.  i didn’t use any pastel on the background, which was mid gray. i changed the position of the moon from lower to higher. you can see antarctica at the bottom of the painting.

starting with ultramarine blue, i used the palette knife to lay in the large areas. then i put in the green. then the earth color. but all of this in several stages. i’d put in the blue, which is the negative space, then try to put down the brown objects then sliced back into it with the ocean again, then back to the land with different colors. at this point the only white is the underlying pastel.

somewhere in the middle of the back and forth process i decided i needed to see the background now. so i mixed up some dark microcrystalline wax and put black and ultramarine and burnt umber, and slathered it on with a palette knife.

i’ve been messing around. i ended up putting blue in the shadows of the moon and several different layers of browns on the landforms. i went over the oceans with cobalt and prussian and a little white. and i’ve brushed on a layer of microcrystalline wax, more black and prussian blue.

it’s funny, but every layer of paint outlines a different contour for the various landforms. i’m constantly revising what i’ve drawn, even at what you would think was a late stage. but it doesn’t matter with wax; i could come in at the end and decide i wanted the moon back down at the bottom, and just excise it and paint a new one in.

now i’ve started in with the clouds. i’m painting just like i paint in oils, cold wax is a substance with a lot of body.

i’m waiting to the end, i think, before torching the planets. how apocalyptic that sounds. on the jupiter painting i just finished, i burned the wax in with every layer. i was constantly pulling down the eyeglasses and pressing the switch on my heatlamp, feeling like the welder in flashdance.  for this painting i’m too in love with the way the wax is going down just like it is, and wondering if i let it dry long enough will i be able to buff it up and call it done? plenty of wax paintings have been done that never came near a heat lamp or any other source of heat.

i’m very pleased with my progress on this. i like doing planets. i’m wondering if i can get images off google earth that i could use, because i could do closeups. i could do the fiddly bits. a little research says i can, clouds and all. how delicious. i can spend hours looking for source images, cruising around examining features of the planet. i can do this, wasting entire days or nights, depending.

but not tonight.

a pair of beauties

i wanted to do another planet in encaustic. the last one i did was jupiter, and it turned out so well that i thought i would to ahead and do another. but which planet? mars is monotone, venus is too much like the sun. i could try doing the sun, but it somehow didn’t occur to me. i could do a moon, one of jupiter’s, perhaps, with loads of radiating lines and fractures. but they were all too much the same color.

so the earth. but which view? i didn’t want to be chauvenistic about it. there are too many views of the north american continent. neither did i want to pick a  hackneyed european view. what i wanted was the poles. what i wanted was the clouds. what i wanted was the circulation of the clouds against the blue. what i wanted was a hurricane.

but alas, what i found was this neat view of both the earth and the moon, shot by some orbiting spacecraft out to make a survey of the planets. it’s a real shot, not a composite,  and it shows the moon at a slightly different angle than we’re used to seeing it.

then i picked a panel. jim had already gessoed and set aside a number of panels for both of us to use in our encaustic journeys. this one was the twin of one he’d just put a carnival scene in egg tempera on, and it was nearly square – 54×48, and i snatched it up.

one thing i’m going to do this time, i’m going to weigh the panel before i put any wax on it, because i want to find out how many pounds i’m going to use on a panel of this size. encaustic is traditionally done on small panels, mainly because i don’t know. but at this size, 4 feet square and a bit, it’s already heavy, being masonite backed by 1×2 bracing. i’ll weigh it tomorrow.

i’ve been talking with jim about the way we’re into doing things the old fashioned (cheap) way, and my recent conversion to it. previously, i’ve gone to a lot of trouble and expense to collect all the colors i could ever want to paint with in both oil and watercolor. i’ve got a complete set of watercolors that take up several not so small boxes. i’ve got a much larger set of oil paints that take up an orange box and spill out over the sides. this represents hundreds if not thousands dollars of paint, albeit collected over the past 30 years but hey.

now, after being exposed to jim’s style of studio work, which he’s honed over the last 50 years, i’ve decided that i might as well learn to mix paints from the raw materials and free myself from the tyranny of art supply stores who would treat me as an end user of their products. and i’ve got a thing in cooking against using processed foods, because not only are the manufacturers using the cheapest ingredients possible, but they’re doctoring them to look and taste more nutritious than they are, and often they’re poisoning me with the chemicals they add. the same with paints.

so, i’ll do it myself and avoid all the snake oil and pitchblende.

now i have a whole set of pigments in a conveniently arranged series of tiny little containers that will last me for years. i can take a little bit of pigment, and mix it with any binder i choose, and make paint that is nothing but pigment and binder (no fillers or extenders or imitation ingredients). watercolor – add gum arabic. oil – add linseed oil. acrylic – add acrylic medium. encaustic – add wax. et voila. so i’m a new convert, and very fundamentalist about it. everyone should throw away their tubes and make their own paint. yarrr.

anyway. the one medium i haven’t mastered is pastels. my friend jim bianchi in charlottesville has been trying to teach me how to use pastel for years, and i’ve never gotten it. but what he’s really doing is trying to teach me to paint, all wrapped up in pastel technique, and so i have of course not understood what he was trying to teach me. i can only, it seems, understand painting my way, and don’t tend to learn from the experience of others. i remember telling my mo that many times while i was growing up, much to my later chagrin (sorry mom).

anyway. since i’ve always been really frustrated by my lack of technique in pastel, i decided that i might as well do the underpainting that way. pastel on gesso on board? it’s not recommended, exactly. but that’s enough to interest me, so fine.

the way i use pastel, it turns out, is directly, stick to panel, and smooshed in with a finger when i’m done applying it. pastel doesn’t take really well to board, it’s too hard and in this case too smooth, but i started with raw umber, which in pastel is a warm light gray, outlining my objects. when i had everything indicated (here’s how i draw my first marks – i stand far back from the board and hold the reference photo in front of my eyes. then i wisk it away and note the position on the board, walk to it with one eye still closed, and swipe a mark, then step back and start with another feature. then i used the raw umber for the darker white of the clouds,  and progressed to burnt umber for the dark earth and white for the clouds. then some mid gray for the low clouds, green for the andes mountains, a light purple for the cloudy parts of the amazon basin, and ultramarine blue for the ocean.

you can just see the first moon i drew, on teh lower right hand corner. i didn’t like it there when i got it there, because it gave the picture too much weight, so i floated it up to the other corner, and liked it there. i noticed when doing the drawing of the moon, upside down becuase i often draw things at different angles to the proper viewing position, that there’s not only a man in the moon, but when seen upside down the moon looks rather lke a skull. which is cool. how metaphorical. dead moon, skull. man in the moon reversed to be skeleton in the moon. fecund earth, dessicated moon. well, it tickles me.

then i started on another one. this is on a 30×40 panel, which i had whipped out at first thinking it was big enough, but when jim offered me the 4×4 one i jumped at it, and then had this nice smaller panel all set up. and then i found a picture of the earth with no identifiable land masses. too fucking cool. it has what i think is antarctica, but otherwise it’s just ocean and cloud, and that’s exactly what i was looking for. i wish it had been a full earth, but i’ll take what i can get.

so i took pastel and started in. the first time i did this it turned out a little bit different, but the gesso hadn’t been well sanded and it was very rough, and pastel doesn’t like too rough. it’s like chalk on a sidewalk, and pretty much there’s nothing left in your hand except rubbed-off pigment on your palm. didn’t want to do that. so jim sanded my panel for me, before i could get to it. you have to be careful with jim that way. mention something you lack and he gets right on it, neglecting his own work to tend to your needs. the guilt is overwhelming, so i try not to need too much.

so, drawn in with raw umber, this time on a white ground (the first earth was on a toned ground, mid gray), i turned the board this way and that and drew in the cloud masses. i was taken with how much like continents the clouds work. they follow a lot of the same rules you can construct for land masses in seas of water. fluid dynamics. i studied it in college. would have gone on to be a climatologist if i’d finished school. but that was in the late 70s, and i don’t think i’m going to go back now. tho you never know. i might get bored with painting and writing fiction. as if.

it’s funny how differently i  draw when i’m  putting in the blue. when i’m drawing the edges of the clouds i draw one line, when i’m drawing in the edges of the ocean, i draw another line, even tho these are the same edge. it’s the difference between drawing an object and drawing the space around the object, another trick in seeing like an artist. first i drew the positive clouds, and then i went back over my lines and drew the negative ocean, and got more accurate with every pass. tomorrow i go back and refine my masses and shapes. i won’t do anything to correct the colors, i’m just worried about getting the contours, the lines, as accurate as i can, always keeping in mind the fact that i will be the only one to ever notice.

so, an exciting couple of paintings. because i have this opportunity, i’m going to try to approach the encaustic part of this painting differently. on one painting i’ll put on wax and then fuse it, put on wax and fuse it. i’ll constantly be whipping the sunglasses on and off, feeling like a welder as i reach for the heat lamp switch. with the other one, i’m going to put wax on and put wax on, and never heat it until the final fusing at the end, when i plan to melt the whole thing to molten liquid. insert crazy laugh. mwahahaha.

my sewing room 4

it’s funny. usually it’s me that’ll go have a look at what jim’s painting, and immediately spot something wrong. usually i blurt it out rather triumphantly.

well jim did the same t hing to day. he walked by my painting, sitting in teh back hall, and stopped suddenly because he’d seen something wrong.

the chair leg. i’d painted the shadow right over it, hadn’t i. well yes. so i need to scrape it off with my fingernail.

but it took me a little while to do it, several days i guess since my last post, and every time he passed the painting it jumped out at him.

i put him out ofhis misery today.

there wasn’t much to be done to finish it. you probably can’t tell any difference and haven’t been able to for several sessions. it’s all subtleties.\it’s nitpicky fussy layers upon layers of paint that doesn’t want to go down except in glops, and dry quickly and get sticky.

on the other hand, that’s the beauty of wax. endless layers of mostly transparent, actual depth, real optical mixing of colors. such a nice thing.

i finally gt hold of some quinacridone gold. it’s a color i found at daniel smith years ago, and with rich green gold it is my favorite  color, especially thin. i wanted to buy some dry pigment, but nobody sells it. in fact, nobody hardly sels it in tube colors. so i found guerra paints because people in the forums led me there thanks folks, and they’ve bought up all the remaining quinacridone gold because they think it’s a nice color too. it was a car color. it was discontinued in 2996? and nobody’s wanted to paint cars that color since. i find that hard to believe, because it’s a beautiful shiny transparent gold. now, rich green gold probably turned out looking like snot green wen they sprayed it on cars. do they still make that? axomethine yellow?

anyway, i talked to the helpfull guy at guerra, who told me that no i didn’t want it in dry pigment form because i couldn’t possibly mull it fine enough to be transparent when made into paint. at best i could end up with a burnt sienna color. so, i got an alkyd dispersion, which basically resembles owoodstain in consistency and smell. they make the pigment into a water dispersion as well, for people who work in acrylic or watercolor or egg tempera. but i’m working with wax at the moment, so water kind of doesn’t work very well, so i’m stuck with concentrated stain.

i dipped my smallest palette knife into it, very thin, and let it finish dripping, and then let it continue finishing over my palette and then wiped it off of the palette knife, and my hand, a very thorough stain, like instant tan only this looks convincing. but orange.

then i added a small palette knife full  of wax medium (beeswax and orange oil) and mixed it up. it was very strong.

i put it on the chest of drawers to the right. it needed it. then i stuck it on the windows and on the blanket rack and on the chair, and a little on the lights and the folding screen.

for soe reason i found the quinacridone gold covered the whites as well as the darks, which would make it opaque. perhaps i used it way too thick even at the dilution i mixed it up to, maybe i should have used one drop to a knifeblade full of wax. i slathered it on with an old brush that i hadn’t bothered loosening up in turpentine first

i singed it. in quinacridone gold. which doesn’t look too thick over the white, and was hard to make clear at the further dilution i had to make in order to sign my name.

the next step is to take it down to the studio and fry it.

i fried my daffodil experimental painting the other day. about a mnoth ago i picked a daffodil and cut it n half lengthwise and put it down on a board, and covered it with paste wax. and then i let both halves sit. i suppose i should have fused the one half right away, but i couldn’t bring myself to melt a perfectly good flower.

so both halves exuded this watery brown stuff about a week later. they’re all dry and somewhat dessicated now, under the wax.

i was on the pohone to my ex the other day, and so annoyed with how he was going on that i turned on the heat lamp and fused one half of the daffodil painting. i didn’t even think about it, because i was on the phone, being annoyed. i just went ahead and melted the half until the whole half of the painting was clear molten liquid, with a dried half of daffodil in the midst of it.

i haven’t seen it since. it has gone back to being translucent and semi opaque now, undoubtedly. the other side will still be somewhat sticky as it continues to dry as the solvent evaporates. whether it will have to be heated at all if i let it sit long enough is one of the experiments i’m doing with this painting.

i’ve sent off two of my early encaustic paintings as presents. i gave the dragon to my brother, a dragon, who lived in taiwan and taught engligh. and i gave the icon to a real monk friend of mine, and had it blessed by an orthodox priest for use as an icon. so that’s cool.

now that i’m finished with this painting, i’m going to finally get to the things that have been hanging over the chair in the picture, which is several wall hangings i’m also making as gifts. and then i have to pull out my silk table again and get started teaching myself a new trick.

my sewing room 4

i’m deepening the shadows. i began dilineating the chair, which i’d been avoiding up until now, just like i’m still avoiding the dresser in the foreground. but i’ve done a lot with grays, unfortunately the shortcut taken (black plus white rather than blue red and yellow).

i can see that the whole thing is rather tilted beyond the distortion of the digital lens of my fuji coolpix, which is the low end of digital cameras. never mind that, i wish the sound recording part of my digital camera still worked so that i could put sound on my youtube videos of my grandson.

i’m very bothered by one detail of badly drawn perspective. the top of the baseboard molding on the left is way wrong, or maybe it’s the bottom of the molding. and i still think the lines fo the dresser drawers on the right could use a better eye.

i’ll turn the painting upside down and look at the lines from that angle, and i’ll be able to fix them easily that way.

i’m almost at the end now. i mixed up all the strange colors for the fabrics, bright blues, purples, scarlets. i was very frustrated, because no matter how heavily i mixed in the pigment, it was transparent, and hardly made a dent on the underlying color. only if i mixed white in would it be opaque. and that maddens me. so i’m going to have to go back over the blues and purples several times, and that means letting the wax paste dry, and that means waiting. if i go in too soon with more, i only rub up what’s underneath because of the solvent.. but i encountered that problem in oil painting. when i’d try to do too much too fast it’d just glop up. so patience. i put in the scene out the window, the lawns, the tree, the distant buildings and trees, the blue sky all of maybe 2 inches wide.

everything’s almost there. except that i have to do something to almost everything. the floor needs its lines and the shadows restated, the dresser needs to look like wood, the sewing machine needs its knobs, the material needs to look like it’s draped, the box of rolled up patterns needs to look like cardboard and craft paper, the books in the racks need colors.

of course, the real sewing room looks nothing like this. in the time since i started this picture, i have filled those top two shelves and piled things on top of the box of newsprint lower down. the cat’s sitting on the sewing table, there’s electronic junk piled up underneath on the floor, and i’ve been only waiting to finish the painting before the table and sawhorses leaning up against the wall go to be my silk table in the bedroom, and the folding screen in front of it hangs out on the porch to block the view so i can keep my bedroom door open all night for the breezes.

but i’m not quite done yet. i have to fix those angles, i have to keep laying down material colors on the chair and the blanket rack. the other room has to be finished, including can you tell that’s a painting on the far wall? and i’m not done with the view outside either. the lights need work, the sewing maching, like i said before.

i’m at the point where i’m liking this painting again. i started out being compelled to do it because of the perfect way the scene looked when i saw it suddenly, right after having actually arranged it. oooh i must do a painting – why not an encaustic? i’ve been doing still lives of my rooms for many years, bookshelves, kitchen, stove, etc. whatever looks so perfectly arranged that it’s like being in a museum. well, because of jim’s taste in renovation and decoration, i do live in a museum, and there are a dozen paintings i could do that are simply perfect little interiors begging to be painted. and jim’s encouraging that. he wants to see the bookshelf, the dresser, the pantry, the altar of love, the mummy display.

in the middle of doing the painting, i didn’t like it as much. it was in that ugly middle stage, where everything is awkward and difficult, where there are more problems to be solved than enthusiasm cells for going on. i’ve left a few paintings at that stage, and never went back to them. then threw them out so i never could. but persistence handles all those objections, and anyway finishing is what makes a painting. not the broad underpainting, but the tight expressive little dashes of highlights and rich deep darks. all those details.

but now i’m to where most of it looks like what it is, and that’s where i’m satisfied and stop working on it. because where is there to go after you’ve got it looking like itself? sign it and start on something else.

so only one more session and i’ll stop, i almost promise.

after i finish that by god i’m going to deal with the material  slung over the back of the chair, which is an unfinished wall hanging for my friend kerstin who got me a gift certificate to an art supply place, bless her heart. and when i’m done with that, the silk table goes up and i figure out how to make regular acid silk dyes from fiber-reactive mx dyes. it’s a simple formula involving salt and vinegar but it’s not widely known because… damn just get silk dye in liquid form or get the powdered acid dyes. don’t try to reinvent the wheel. you always take the hardest path from one place to another. that’s why you’re a loser.

i’ve had family members say this to me.

i like reinventing the wheel. it keeps me active. i struggle to find my own answers instead of relying on received wisdom, and really enjoy innovating when it actually works. and there’s nothing more infuriating than to tell me there’s only one way to do whatever. because there’s always another way, and if i have to find it myself i’ll do it just to show you.

my sewing room 3

getting in there with the glazes. it’s difficult to put on a glaze that’ll stick. i’m having great difficulty using brushes, because they gum up so quickly. and i can’t make fine lines when i’m dealing with something of the consistency of shaving cream. if i dilute the hell out of it and make it very heavily pigmented, perhaps that’ll work. or maybe i’ll be forced to inscribe a line and then fill it with dark. hard to say.

even building it up as much as i’ve been doing, it’s not very built up at all. nothing like the jupiter painting. because i’m using brushes instead of palette knives, i guess.

i spent some time correcting the verticals and horizontal in the right half of the painting. for the shadows i’ve been using burnt umber and ultramarine blue, and i guess i haven’t been putting enough pigment in it because the darks are really weak.

now i’ve gone and mixed up some carbon black, and put that everywhere the shadows and darks are supposed to go. it works well, but i’m suspicious of putting black in paintings. i have to when i’m dyeing fabric, because you can’t get dark colors without black, but i’m used to finding other ways to make darks when i’m using paint. but that didn’t stop me from using all the black i mixed up.

there’s not much more to go into this except for local color. i haven’t painted in any of the fabric yet, and the chair is still sketchy, but that’s because i shy away from that much persnickety detail. at this point.

i still have some fine lines to put in, and i’m frankly stumped. the next time i go back, i’ll try using way thinned super-saturated wax and pigment, and if that doesn’t work i’ll scrape out a line and fill it with dark.

and then what? this isn’t like any other encaustic painting i’ve done, mostly because it’s so thin. there’s not much actual wax on it. it’s getting to be a done picture, however, and i’ll have to stop soon.

but hey, i can completely ruin it when i take the heat lamp to it for the final fusing. it could run all over the place. we’ll find out soon.