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thirteen’s a lucky number. here is a picture of the finished photo, taken outdoors and auto adjusted. i like it.
well, i’m going to call it done. i stuck a little green over the rocks on the bottom, and that might be enough. i’ll go take a photo (when it stops raining) in natural light, and post that just so you can see what i’m seeing.
but i’m pretty much done now.
what’s next?
it’s not over yet. i actually signed it last night, but then i sat back and looked at it, and it still needs more work. i managed to put a veil of white over the dry rocks in the foreground, and took another photo.
most of what i did yesterday involved burning the hell out of the painting. i took a really long time on the blue reflections, making fist-sized pools of absolutely molten wax, trying to move the white particles out of the way and let the underlying darks come thru. it’s an act of patience and faith to leave a heat lamp over a molten pool of wax. it starts moving and you don’t even see it. i had dreams about it later.
and this was effective. but then i had to go back in with some light gray/brown (white and raw umber, makes a bluish gray until i added more umber, and then it was brown). i put it on the rocks that aren’t covered by reflections. and then i put it on some of the rocks that are covered by reflections. i put a thin wash of raw unber over the yellow reflection of the tree trunk on the right, because it was just too stark before.
after i stuck the veil over the dry rocks the composition looked better, because those rocks are markedly different from all the other rocks simply because they’re dry. in this photo the contrast still isn’t good enough, and i may have to put on another veil. what i still have to do in the water is to coat out the bottom (the part that isn’t huge giant rocks but sort of sandy bottom) with a blue gray and burn it again. the area in the middle of the darkness on the right, and the area beneath the enormous rock ledge at the top left of the painting need this.
but this is an entire day’s work, so it looks like there’ll be an 11th or even 12th post.
and then, it’s getting on for november and i’ll be starting my novel for national novel writing month, so it may be that i wont be starting on another painting for awhile. on the other hand, i’ll be making headway on my mom’s quilt. at any rate, i’ll report it here, and you can check out my fiction if you want to.
this is the wax cabinet in my studio. from left to right on the top – bleached food-grade microcrystalline wax in mineral spirits and/or orange solvent; unbleached microcrystalline was in mineral spirits and/or orange solvent; some unidentified concoction of microcrystalline and solvent.
on the middle shelf, a couple of empty jars, and behind them an old jar of bleached beeswax and turpentine, which i am now loathe to use; three jars of beeswax and orange oil, and my latest batch of unfiltered beeswax with orange oil.
on the bottom shelf, from top to bottom, i have what’s left of a ten point slab of beeswax in the mailing box; sitting at the edge of the mailing box to the right is a 2.5 lb chunk of unfiltered beeswax by ebert honey out in iowa ($3.75/lb). under the mailing box is a slab of microcrystalline wax, the cheapo dark stuff, and next to it is a chunk of bleached microcrystalline wax. under that, still in its bag, is another huge block of dark microcrystalline.
it’s so nice to have a full pantry.
Making Encaustic Medium
since i just got 5 lbs of unfiltered beeswax, i thought i’d make up a batch of encaustic medium myself. i’d let jim do all the previous batches. how hard could it be? we got a used electric skillet some time ago, so i just plopped half of the block into the skillet and turned the temperature on low. less than 200F, which was the first number on the dial. the wax melted quickly, turning brown in the pan (because of all the debris). i kept lifting and turning it, which was foolish, because every time i did i splashed liquid wax all over the place and had to scrape it off once it had cooled.
figuring out how much citrus solvent to use was the tricky part. jim didn’t remember the proportions he used last time, and discovered that the proportions differed according to what kind of wax he was using. so i did some quick figuring. 2.5 lb translates to 5 quart jars of liquid, if wax weighed what water weighs, which i have no idea. but i figured if i put in a quart of orange oil to 5 quarts of melted beeswax, i wouldn’t be going far wrong. i wasn’t looking to make a thin gel out of the wax and solvent, but i didn’t want it rock hard, either.
when the wax was all the way melted, i took the element out of the skillet just in case, and stirred in a quart of citrus oil. and then i lifted the skillet and took it over to where i had jars all ready, and poured it in. well, i dripped it in. the hot wax wanted to go right over the side of the pan and drip down off the bottom, so i stuck the leg it was dripping off of right into the jar, and let it go. i ended up with some wax on the paper under the jars, but it wasn’t too bad. i filled the jars almost to the top, and when i got to the bottom of the skillet there was a whole lot of debris, so i poured all that into another jar, so i could use it deliberately on some project. then i wiped out the skillet with a paper towel while it was still warm, and put everything away.
don’t put the lid on hot wax until it has melted unless you want a vacuum seal that won’t quit. i waited until it was all the way cool, on jim’s advice, and it was fine. if you leave the top on too long, tho, the solvent will begin to evaporate.
and now it’s sitting in my pantry shelf waiting to be used.
whee-ha.
wow. ten posts and i’m still not finished. today i did a bit of an experiment. i’m starting to not like what i’m doing, because it’s not like what i wanted, or what the reference photo looks like. but i haven’t gotten tired of messing with it yet.
today i got out the really thin black paint and put the dark lines back in with a finger. i love painting with my hands. i kept leaving fingerprints, which melt differently than just random blobs of paint. how chuck close. how da vinci.
after burning in the darks, i looked at it and could see nothing else to do, so i prepared to put on a layer of clear wax. that is, wax with no pigment. first i took my big jar of yellow beeswax and citrus solvent, thinned it out with more citrus oil, and then slapped it on a corner of the painting. i burned it in immediately, because it really burns in faster and easier if you do it while it’s still wet. here’s the before and after on this:
fresh wax paste
burned in wax
i’m struggling with the chemistry of the wax. when wax is melted and mixed with solvent, when cooled, what state is the wax in? is it a solid? is it a liquid? technically you could call my encaustic medium “paste wax.” what state is paste wax? solid? liquid? slush? is it tiny little pieces of beeswax in a solid state suspended in solvent? does the solvent melt the wax and hold it in a liquid state? these nitpicky little determinations are important. if it’s a liquid, then the job of melting it is easier. if it’s a liquid, then the bonding problems that exist with poorly-burned-in was aren’t as pressing. if the solvent acts to dissolve the layer beneath the newly laid-on wax, then it creates a bond, and burning in becomes less important.
jim was taught encaustic back in the 60s using cold wax (wax mixed with turpentine). jasper johns and others experimented with it. they didn’t like using turpentine as a solvent, because it offgasses toxicity. but they didn’t have orange oil back then. orange oil – d-limonene – is so nontoxic that i can sit in offgassing citrus fumes all day long and not even get a scratchy throat. the jar of white wax i ended up using today was originally mixed up with odorless mineral spirits and citrus oil, and i could really tell the difference. i came away from my painting session, after having burned in a layer of clear wax over the entire 700+ square inches, with a raw throat and mild asthma. this was due to the odorless mineral spirits, used in making early batches of encaustic medium due to jim’s mistaken belief that just because it’s odorless, it’s harmless. which isn’t true. odorless mineral spirits is merely petroleum solvent. it’s like inhaling gasoline.
so. i had a corner of the painting covered with yellow beeswax, and when i burned it in, it stayed yellow and not very translucent at all. i sat there looking at it, dismayed, and finally went up and scraped it all off with a palette knife. it was still warm, so i could do this. the layers beneath hadn’t warmed up enough to stay warm after taking the lights off, but the top layer of clear wax was still warm to the touch and wet feeling in my hand once i’d scraped it off.
okay, start over. i got out a jar of bleached beeswax that jim had done up months ago. it was the only jar left of bleached white and citrus oil, with some mineral spirits because jim was trying to save a buck before i educated him about petroleum spirits. we have other jars of white wax, but they’re jim’s, because he’s very fond of using bleached (food grade) microcrystalline wax, which is a petroleum product. i won’t use it. it doesn’t smell like beeswax.
so. jar of bleached beeswax. i thinned it with citrus oil, and then slapped it down on the board and burned it in. for this burning in, i actually wanted the paint to move, so i took my time and heated it up slowly with my hand-held heat lamp (flood light, really, only i’m using a grow light because it’s less intense than a floodlight and i don’t need to wear sunglasses). i held the lamp farther away from the surface than i usually do – about 3″, and moved it over a wider area. i was trying to heat the wax at depth, in order to get the dark outlines of the rocks to reassert themselves.
for some reason, perhaps the thickness of the wax, the lower layers didn’t want to move. the clear wax flowed and ran, but the colors underneath didn’t budge. which was not what i was expecting or hoping for. only when the entire area became molten at a deep level did the wax start to move. and then it was like a stream, the whole fist-sized area began to flow gently toward the edge of the board. usually when wax starts to move, all i have to do is raise the heat lamp and blow on it, and the wax snaps back and freezes. but when it’s all melted like this, blowing on it just moves it more, and i have to wait for the wax at depth to cool, which takes a long time. i can visualize a small painting with its entire surface molten and beginning to shift. perhaps i’ll play with that soon.
i didn’t want to put the clear wax on the entire painting at the time, so i did it in sections, melting each edge together as i joined sections. when i got done with melting this fairly thick layer of wax, some areas felt soapy and wet to the touch, even when cooled. i knew these weren’t melted enough. the area was more translucent than well-melted (and cooled) wax, stickier, with little bubbles in it. so i went back over it until i saw the wax move. interestingly, i saw little tiny bubbles moving around inside the molten wax, like little tiny pearls. they didn’t pop or come to the surface, they just rolled around in the liquid wax.
so now i’ve got clear wax over the entire painting, except for the dry rocks. i still have to do something to make them look more lifelike (probably a veil, meaning a coat of really thin white, to obscure the details and garishness of the color). and then maybe i’m done. it’s still different than i had in mind, but that’s art for you. all the happy surprises.
tomorrow.
my, this is taking a long time.
and it’s getting further and further from what i wanted.
today we had a visitor, and then i had a fight with my kid, and didn’t get to the studio until after 5, so only had enough time to put on a layer of raw sienna over the water without reflections. i was hoping to lighten the bottom. and now what i’m missing is the dark of the lines around the rocks. so i’m going to put that in tomorrow, and perhaps then can i put on a layer or two of clear wax and start making some of those blue reflections get more transparent so that you can see the bottom thru the reflection.
that’s perhaps going to be difficult, but i don’t know yet, because i’m still unsure about how white acts when heated. i’m expecting the parts overlaying the dark lines to break up and boil first, because the black underneath is quicker to heat than the lighter colors. again, i don’t know. and like i said yesterday, if it comes to that, i’m willing to scrape back some of the paint. but i’m hoping i can burn thru it instead.
the color balance on my photoshop isn’t showing the blueness of the reflections. i’ll have to shoot it outside tomorrow. that’ll eliminate the flash in the middle, as well.
today i reinforced the blue reflections everywhere, and then put a layer of wax and raw umber over all the non-reflective places. once i burned it in it looked a little deeper, a little more convincing. the reflection of the tree trunk is nice, but there needs to be some darker reflections of the branches as well. tomorrow i guess i’ll do something about the dry rock in the foreground (a veil of some version of white), and some lightening in the underwater rocks. and then i’ll slap a coat of clear wax on top and burn that in. and then touch up stuff, and maybe another coat of clear wax and i’ll be done.
i just got some really reasonable ($3.75/lb) unfiltered beeswax from elbert honey company. i got five pounds of honey as well, really nice. the beeswax smells great, and has little bee parts in it, which is what i wanted. i actually asked phil, the guy, if they didn’t have any really dirty beeswax, but all they had was the stuff they melt themselves, and it’s quite clear, except for a little brown scum on the bottom. but i’m delighted. so tomorrow i’m probably going to melt it and mix it with orange oil ( to make my version of encaustic medium) and put it into jars so i can use it real soon now on something where the beeswax is featured more than pigment. one of those abstract mostly wax paintings, where the romance of the wax is what’s important, rather than the quality of the painting or the exactness of the representation.
but for now, to bed. it’s been an emotionally harrowing day, and i’m going to bed now.
i sure am taking my time about this painting. today i went down and made up some very white blue paint and spread it over the sky reflections i’ve already put in. i was very careful, again, not to burn holes in the white paint, and it stuck together wonderfully. i anticipate putting a coat or two of pure wax on after this, and only then letting the dark burn thru.
but isn’t it pasty, and can you think it’s surface reflections? i don’t know yet. it keeps getting further from what i was envisioning. i could end up scraping and otherwise attacking the surface if all else fails. stay tuned.
i didn’t get to do much yesterday. but what i did do made a huge difference. but first of all, i lied about what i was going to do next. when i left the studio the night before last, i had in mind to complete the bottom the next day, and only then start on the reflections. but when i got down there yesterday afternoon, i decided to go ahead with the first layers of reflection. so sue me.
first i took some light blue paint that i’d been saving under a glass on my palette. i do this alot, saving paint from one painting to the next. i find it hard to throw away perfectly good pain just because ‘m finished with something. so i put the blue paint on where the reflections of the sky will go. and it was way too dark. there’s not enough contrast between the bottom and the surface to even be able to tell where i’ve got the blue.
i scumbled on the blue, to begin with , and burned it in. and the white in the mix started to tear apart immediately, of course. i kind of knew it would, so i didn’t go too far in heating up this layer of wax. it was apparent to me that i was going to have to put on another coat of blue, and much lighter. but in the meantime i wanted to get past the careful outlining of the rocks i’d been doing, and wanted to put a little atmosphere into it.
so i mixed up a very light batch of paint (meaning i used very little pigment and loads of wax, and thinned it down with orange oil until it was easily spreadable. i mixed in some white, added some cream colored paint i’d already mixed, stuck a little raw umber into it. it was a gray brown, and more waxy than painty. then i plopped several huge palette knives full of this paint onto the board. it landed with a very satisfying plop. spreading it with a palette knife was going to be difficult. i’d just bought a huge palette knife, but it would have spread the wax in a scumbling way (that is, leaving huge gaps between bits of paint) and i didn’t want that, so i discarded the knife and spread the paint with my hands. i love that part.
at that point i had to leave the studio for the day, and so i only melted a little bit of the new layer before it dried. so yesterday morning i came back into the studio and resumed burning in, which took forever because i only use a heat lamp and not a torch, which blows the was off the board if not handled properly.
when i was done melting in, i noticed that the water was now much more obscured than it had been. i had to be very careful melting this layer because of the white in it. i wanted it to melt as one sheet, and not break up, and over the dark lines it was very difficult to keep the white from bubbling open and letting the dark come thru. however, close up it looks marvelous. and after a few more layers the bubbling will be widespread. i just thought i’d limit it at the beginning.
i’m going to deal with the cloudiness of the water later. first i’m going to put on the brighter sky reflections, and burn that in. and then perhaps i’m going to have to lay in some raw umber over the shadowed parts of the water. and maybe i’m going to have to restate some of the lines, and put some highlights on some of the underwater rocks. time will tell, and at this point it’s a question of balancing the elements rather than being a slave to the photo.
one thing i did do, however, was deal with the foreground rocks. they needed to be more brown than pink, so i mixed up some burnt sienna and slapped it on, and then burnt it in, mainly on the bit of rock that’s just barely underwater, but i used some burnt sienna over some of the black lines on the dry rock, too. and then i put another coat of the light wax i’d stuck over the water, back over the foreground rock so it would still look underwater.
anyway, it’s rather a mess at this point, but the more i look at it the better it gets.
that’s always been my goal in painting. i want the scene to look so real you can walk out into it. but not to make it look like a photo. there are other kinds of real.
i have to apologize to all my readers, loyal and casual, for the quality of my indoor flash photographs. i have only now discovered auto levels in photoshop, and now we can all see the colors correctly. mea culpa.
today i don’t know wht happened but it was forever getting to the studio.
oh yeah, i remember. now, our phone’s been out for over a week. it was out for four days before we called it in, and THE NEW AT&T gave us a trouble ticket and told us the guy would be out in a week. so we didn’t take or make calls for a week. not such a biggie, unless shit happens.
okay, the week passed, and they were supposed to be here this morning. so what happens during breakfast but the phone rings. we almost didn’t recognize it, but thought it might be the construction going on next door. it was the repair dude, on his way to us, stuck in traffic. wow. either he had the magic touch or his phone is special, because that was the first time the phone rang all week. so i cancelled the trouble ticket.
and why would i do such a thing? because, if he’d come to check out our line (i discussed this with him in detail), he would find that there was nothing wrong with it, because wasn’t i on the phone to him at the moment? and finding nothing wrong with the line, he would have to conclude that the trouble must be inside the house, and charge us $85 to have come out for nothing. so, to avoid a capricious charge that we don’t need, being starving artists and pensioners, i canceled the ticket.
after all, this has happened before. jim and i argued about it, but i believe that this has happened three times this year, where the phone will go out for days, and then mysteriously come on again, often right after we call in a trouble ticket. something they must do to test the line must reset the thing, or something. maybe it’s happened four times in the last year. anyway it goes on, and i call at&t to cancel the trouble ticket, and things go back to normal. but this time it’s been a bit too long. the last time it happened was during the big rain when we had a week of high humidity. i’d already figured out it was a short (because my ex the exphone guy told me so and my brother the cable guy told me so), but since it came back on afterwards, no biggie. and this week in atlanta we’ve had another batch of rain for several days, and today it started looking like it might clear up (we haven’t seen the sun for days now) but then it started drizzling, and suddenly it was like portland on a good day, where we couldn’t see the buildings down the street and everything squished. i had to hold the leash of the big dog because the sidewalk is wet and leaf-ridden, and i don’t want jim pulled two ways by two dogs and go down. if he should bust a hip we’d have to rig a way for him to paint while in traction, and that’s no joke.
so i cancelled the call. and called at&t back and bitched at them about how hard they are to contact when you have a phone out. they were so hard to talk to in person that i had to deliberately fuck up my responses to the automated menu and be passed in irritation to a human. they said not a lot to help me. since the phone was working, there was no point having someone out; if it happened again call in a ticket.
about ten minutes later i got another call. the phone was right by the sudoku puzzle i was doing, at the kitchen counter. it was a recorded message saying something that i hung up on, mildly irritated that this should be my first reconnection with the world.
and the phone didn’t ring again.
i’ve just joined paperback swap book club, where you take your old, read books, list them on the site, and then someone at random requests one of your books, you take it to the post office and pay media mail postage on it ($2.38) and send it off. for every book someone takes, you get a book in credit. so i spent the morning wrapping books to go to the post office. and then to get my license. and to make sure, i checked the license website. there was a provision for getting a copy of your license ordered online, but you needed your license number. and how were you supposed to get that if you’d lost it? nothing for it but to go downtown to the bureau. so i looked for a phone number to call them, chuffed that i had my phone back on.
but it wasn’t back on. it was off again. the weather had turned damp again and the fucking thing shorted out. again. so i went online to at&t’s site to request a repair. again. i remember from last time the phone went out and i tried to enter a ticket online. in order to request a repair to my home line, i have to fill out an online form, and then enter a special online registration code. and how do you get a registration code? why, they call you at home with it. knowing this, i had requested they send me the damn online code when the phone first went out this time, and by the time i had to request this second repair ticket, it had come in the mail.
so i did that, and now i’ve got the guy coming out to have a look at the line next tuesday at 7 pm. that’ll be 3 weeks without phone service. and i imagine that the weather will turn long before tuesday evening, and i’ll have to call and cancel. again. this gets dizzying. we need to buy a cellphone to back up our landline so that we don’t get caught out in an emergency, but still need the landline for when cellphone service is disrupted or we lose the phone or the baby flushes it. besides, i hate having a cellphone because it means you have to take it with you from room to room so that you’re there when it rings, and if it should become uncharged and you’ve left it somewhere, tough luck.
anyway, this string of events was so over the top that i just had to laugh. you can’t get mad when the whole day is like this, all you can do is see the humor in it and let it go. else you’d have to go postal. especially when you have to spend a couple of hours getting your replacement drivers license after all this.
so never mind the rest of it. i was glad enough to get down to the studio around 3 this afternoon. it had started to rain lightly, and i listened to the dripping eaves for a couple of hours while i started in with some wax.
first things first, start on the dry rocks. in my reference picture they’re a very light burnt sienna, and once they dip under the water they turn into a much darker, more yellow sienna. i mixed up a good chunk of yellow beeswax with some titanium white and burnt sienna. i incorporated some old creamy yellow that i’d been keeping in a pile under a jar, and thinned it to a nice buttery consistency with orange oil. the lighter wax is the dry rock, and the darker pink is the underwater rock. i haven’t touched the top 7/8 of the painting yet; it’s just the way i left it after burning in the really thin black. while the wax was still wet, i took a knife of the really thin black i’d used yesterday for the lines, and dragged it on top of the pink wax. i figured i should do this because the white in the wax is really opaque, and i couldn’t see the lines i’d put down yesterday underneath it. then i burned it in. i was drinking a cup of coffee at the time, sitting on a stool in front of a table where i had the painting flat on its back. i was switching hands holding the heat lamp. the citrus oil was evaporating out of the melting wax. i was overwhelmingly hungry, and my coffee smelled like the best orange flavored coffee i’ve ever had.
this is a closeup of the first burn. i don’t usually put down one color over another color when it’s wet. usually i burn in one layer at a time, mainly out of impatience. but this time i worked fast. and burned it to a molten state. and the black did wonderful flowy breaky things. and this is only the first burning. as i develop it, the black (black, purple and umber) will break up further and get more cool.
i was going to stop there, but nah. i had time to mix up a huge pile of bottom color and burn it in before dinner. and dinner was going to have to come soon, because i was awash in orange fumes. it took a good hour to burn in the whole thing (you can see where i finished, on the left most of the way up, the whitish area is more translucent when warm, and becomes clear when cool), and i came out of the studio smelling like i’d been making marmalade.
i figured i’d show this even tho it’s impossible to see a difference. what i’ve done at this point is mix up a whole load of yellow beeswax with burnt umber and chrome green, thin it with orange oil, spread it on, and burn it in. the wax paint went clear when i burned it in, because umber and chrome oxide are transparent colors. so you have a completely different texture in the water simply due to opacity and transparency. that’s way cool. and one of the things i don’t know about my craft yet. the learning curve is never ending.
i feel about wax the way i feel about making bread, or messing in the garden. it’s good to get down and wrangle with your materials. cooks are like this, things get flung and thumped and crammed to the limits of their endurance. ups package loaders are like this – if it says fragile, throw it. it’s good for them. they ask for it. like a palette knife full of softened wax, it wants to be flung onto the board like a trowel full of cement, and then slathered on with the belly of the knife. it’s so satisfying, the large motions, the big scumbling strokes, the touches that appear slapdash but are actually expressive, you just don’t realize it when you put it on. but after it’s melted, wow.
tomorrow i’ll work more with the foreground rocks, since they’re completely different in character than the river bottom rocks.
again, i didn’t get a picture of the finished north georgia trout stream painting because the lighting was so poor today. i’ll post it tomorrow, weather permitting. or maybe it’ll rain another day, whoopiee.
