encaustic painting – water 2

i’m continuing with my series of encaustic painting of the seascape in kerry.  i was there last fall, at cill rialaig, on the edge of nowhere, studying the sea, the clouds and the rain for a better understanding of the elements.  six months later, i’m working on a way of imaging the very subtle things i’ve been thinking about.

for the record, i’m using a homemade cold wax application on gessoed board, using citrus oil as a solvent, and burning it in with a heat lamp. we’ll call this unorthodox encaustic painting, but since it’s being burned in, it’s actual real encaustic, even tho some fundamentalist artists insist it’s not.  that’s another issue.

here’s the reference photo first, so you know what you’re looking at.

view from cill rialaig

i was using a digital camera that made all the decisions for me when i took all my photos in kerry, so most of my photos of clouds are unfocused.  the camera didn’t know how to focus on soft clouds, and did some funny compromise, and in most of my reference photos, i’ve got a blurry picture of grays doing rain and lowering type things.  consequently, these pictures of clouds, rain, and sea are way atmospheric.  i mean some of them fucking blurry.

so i got out one of my larger panels (i’ve got ten stacked up and ready to go) and cut it into three, grabbed a resulting 12×24 gessoed panel, and started with dark blue on the sea, and light gray on the sky.  pretty simple, eh?  the variations you can see in the sky are the patterns made by the heat lamp as i burned in the wax.  it’s all one color, tho.  as is the water, which is transparent in this first layer, and shows the board very well.

a layer of the darkest gray over the ocean, and then i used the three (or four) midrange grays i had left over from the first painting, and delineated the basic colors.  not at all subtle; almost cartoonish, especially on the lower right, where the rain hits the ocean.

then the darkest gray over the nearest (topmost) cloud, left.  and the three grays in the middle again, restating the few value changes.  note how i’m dipping the light gray over top of the dark gray of the sea and letting it blend in.

and now some darker purple gray.  i might have just mixed this up special, and not enough, because i’ve just mixed a big batch of purple gray for the third painting in this series.  at this point i’m using the very bottom of the grays i’ve been saving in little plastic cups for weeks and months.  some of the grays are very hard and dried out, and they don’t blend very well until they’re flat melted.  and even then they don’t respond to heat very easily.

at this point i got tired of all the darkness, and started in with my lightest grays.  these are green grays, but nobody’s going to notice.  they were left over from another painting, the origin of which is now lost in time.  it doesn’t really look like the same painting, but there’s enough left of the layer underneath that i can tell it’s the next photo in the sequence.  only one coat of wax between these two photos.

and now this is too white, and there’s too much contrast, so i hit the entire rest of the sky with a darker light gray, and melted it all in for a much softer and more subtle appearance.

and now, of course, it’s too much the same all over, so i’m going to lose my patience now and hit it with bold strokes of really white white, the white i started with bleached beeswax for.

beneath the painting below is the reference photo.  you can see how little i have to work with.  and slashing all this white on top of the carefully homogenized board takes a little courage.

the wax on the board below is unmelted, by the way.  the marks are made by palette knife, and often i’m grinding the paint around with the knife, trying to put it on the wavy and pocked surface smoothly.  hahahahaha.

but once burned in, below, it’s not so bad.  it’s starting to get very textural here.  when these paintings come on, they work fast.  the first half, however, is excruciatingly ugly.  all paintings are ugly in the middle of painting them, but it’s particularly bad with wax paintings.

after this stage, there’s not much left.  i restated the dark cloud on the upper left, and burned the white in a bit better.  some of the whiteness is too opaque and still hasn’t melded with its surroundings.

when you look up advice on how far to melt your painting to get it properly burned in, you get a lot of different advice.  a lot of this advice is based on heating your painting with a blow torch, or some other very fast heating device.  i use a lightbulb, so the heating process is slower and more controlled.

sometimes i’ve seen people advising others to fuse their wax until the top layer is shiny; that’s enough.  when it is left merely shiny, then okay it’s a safe bet that the layers of wax are melted to each other, at least the whole body of wax has gotten to that slushy stage where it’s not really solid and it’s not really liquid.  when it’s left shiny and then you take the heat source away and stop melting it,  then there’s lots of texture left in the wax.  there are lumps and bumps, and the really thick lumps of wax aren’t melted all the way.  they’re still solid enough to stick together and make lumps; that’s how you tell.

i tend to melt my wax until the entire field is molten, which is mainly what they recommend, or even insist on, depending.  that means a large shiny lake around the lightbulb, of absolutely even, bumpless liquid wax that is transparent down to the gesso when it’s molten.  there are stages of melted.  depending on the pigment, the wax runs when melted.  if it’s a dark pigment, then it melts readily and flows all over the place in a spreading pool.  if it’s a light pigment, then it melts only after awhile shining the light on it.  if there’s a light patch of wax next to a dark patch of wax, then the dark stuff will melt first, and the light stuff will all at once break down and flow into the dark stuff, or else the dark stuff will spread over the light stuff like a flood.  if it’s light pigment over a previously burned in dark layer, then the dark layer melts before the light one on top, and the light layer breaks up into tiny fragments as it floats away on top of the dark wax, and finally melts and starts churning into the dark wax, so that you get a dull gray, homogenous section of wax if you let it get to this.

and, just as you’re getting used to constant flow, after a while of adding new wax and melting it in, and adding more wax and melting it in, the older pigment stops moving.  what flowed alarmingly when first melted is no longer even moving, never mind blending with the newer stuff, and if something’s really stubborn and just won’t break up, i have to put a fingertip in there and remove it.  owie.

the main trick is to move the heat/light away the moment the wax starts flowing.  that’s if you want a sharpish edge.  if you want a thoroughly blended edge, you have to sit there with the light until it starts to flow, and then hover over it until the edge completely breaks down and floods over the wax next to it.

and the more layers you do this, the more interesting the wax surface becomes, building up such a rich texture, with such depth, that you wonder how you could ever have loved flat acrylic paint.

the painting is almost done.  after looking at it for some time, i brought it back to the studio this morning and added a smear of light gray on the dark water in the  middle, some lighter gray over the darkest part of the cloud, and i think that’s it.  next, yet another painting of rainclouds over the ocean.

elements – water 2

new project – encaustic painting series

okay, i’m doing another encaustic demo.  this blog is full of encaustic painting demos.  and i never get tired of doing them, either.  so here’s yet another one.

while i was on residency in the west of ireland last year, at cill rialaig, i was very taken with the idea of a series of paintings exploring the elements.  things like paintings of only rocks, paintings of only skies, only water.  i dreamed of painting the air, but that’s just about as difficult a thing to paint as you can think of.  painting nothing would be harder, but only just.

i spent my studio time a lot more prosaically, painting tourist pictures and gifts for people who don’t like my more experimental experiments with art.  there was one artist there who liked me right up until the moment she saw the paintings i was working on.  this was an artist whose name is being made right this second by inscrutable museum-quality art involving springs and piano wires.  she was so upset that she told me about her disappointment as if she was talking about another artist altogether, but her heartfelt looks when she confessed that this artist’s work was awful gave her away.  and i’ve never heard from her again, of course, but this is the way it goes on residency; you make instant friends that you never hear from afterwards.  artists pissing in the night.

anyway, on to the work.  you can see the reference photo on the left of the pastel outline.  it was one of those cloudy days were all the color is in the sky.  the light comes peering thru the cloud in vast beams, and there’s nothing as bright as that silvery gleam where the light is hitting the water.  you can only barely see the peninsula just a mile or two across the bay, and there are places were the water comes out of the clouds and fogs the space between cloud and ocean with rain that’s more like thick smoke.

so i’m into the elements.  in this case, it’s water.  i guess water and air.  but the clouds are water, and the sea is water, and the rain is water, and the air blocking the view of the peninsula is water.

the trouble with water being the entire picture is that there’s no real difference between water in its various states.  just varying shades of visibility, really.

there happened to be a roughly 1:2 board all ready to go, so i took it off the stack and started in.  there’s a stack of boards all gessoed up, all sorts of sizes.  this one is 12″x24″ gessoed masonite (or whatever they’re calling it now) and i’ve dragged pastel all over it as merely placemarks.  my method for transferring the image from the reference photo to the board is to stand about 5′ back and hold the photo up in front of my face, covering the board as much as possible.  then i focus my eyes on a detail and whip the paper aside, noting where it falls on the board.  then i rush to the board and swipe a line right there with my pastel, and go back to my position and pick another spot to focus on.  easy.

there are good points and bad about this method.  using a projector also has its good and bad points.  in general, i prefer the distortions of my own eyes to the distortions of a projection lens, so i usually go with that.  and abstracting my marks to only the most obvious and important ones is usually the best way for me to go, lest i get caught up in the details before i’ve even established the general marks.

in sketching out the painting, i’ve used only black, or dark gray, pastel.  and a touch of blue for the sky.  the light gray stuff is the first layer of wax.  i thought i’d get a picture before going too far.  it looks to me as if i’ve already burned in this first layer.  you can tell that i’m not fixing the pastel before starting in on the underpainting.  i don’t really care if i get pastel all over my underpainting.  there’s going to be so many layers of wax that nobody’s going to know much about the first layers.

here’s a closeup of the next layer (inverted), a darker gray filling in the areas around the light gray.  the blue is still pastel.  ad the black you can see, that’s also pastel.  again, i’m pretty sure i’ve burned this in.  but i’ll let you know if i have some ‘raw’ wax in any of the shots.

this is the far shot.  i’ve got dark gray in the ocean and the peninsula, and a little in the top part of the clouds.

and at this point i’ve started taking the painting outside to shoot progress photos, so it’s a little better picture.  sorry about the quality before.  i’ve added a little more black to the clouds, and more white to the sky and water.  you can only tell i’m doing anything to the water by the progressive breaking up of the thin black line in the middle of the white part of the sea.  i really shouldn’t have bothered putting in that detail so soon, and it will haunt me.

for this one i’ve finally put in some blue paint, but it’s old blue dug out from a hardened lump in cup, and there’s green in it.  oops, so what.  i took the same gray i was using in the clouds, which has a bunch of purple and blue in it, and put it over the peninsula, where it’s now way dark.

so i took a bunch more of the gray with the purple, and slathered it all over the clouds.  i’m burning everything in before shooting it at this stage, just so you know, and in many cases there’s more than one layer being put on and burned in before i take the next process shot.  else i’d be running outside every half hour with the board and the camera.

now i’ve gone in and put the same gray in the sea and the shiny area.  and come in with some dark gray and emphasized the peninsula and the darkest of the waves in the foreground.

now there’s more darker gray on top of the clouds.  i’ve added some raw umber into the gray mix.  basically my grays are black and white, dioxazine purple, ultramarine blue, raw sienna, a little green, and whatever else i think of.

now there’s darker grays over the lowest clouds.  and i’ve begun to come back in with lighter gray underneath that cloud, partially obscuring the peninsula.

and now some less-than-terribly dark grays over the sea.  at this point i have white, made with bleached beeswax and titanium white pigment, and i have cream, made with regular beeswax and titanium.  and then i have four or five grays, going from very nice bluish dove gray to angry greasy looking toxic sludgy gray and mostly running along the purple edge.

and now the whole thing looks too dark and brooding, so i basically go over the entire thing with light purply gray, and lighten the whole thing up.  the light ocean is gotten a bit polluted by the dark gray thin line, so i add more white and burn the hell out of it.

and then it was getting dark, and i stopped work, brought the painting up to the front porch, and sat out and looked at it while the light went.  it was painfully purple, but almost done.  a funny thing happened.  as the natural light faded and the incandescent porch light took over, the painting got less and less purple, and finally less and less detailed, and flatter, and finally it looked very photographic, almost like the reference photo, which my paintings never turn out looking like the photos.

i was intrigued by this, and wondered what i’d have to do to the painting under natural light in order to get it to look like it did at night under a 40 watt bulb.

this led to a conversation about george beattie, who painted some of his paintings with that would show up when someone flicked on the paintsblacklight that was installed to provide alternate lighting.  seems a little tacky now, maybe, but i’ll bet now people are coming up with high tech ways to do the same thing.

,

now the white of the ocean is blue, because of that dark line finally disappearing into a churn of white wax.  so i  am going to have to add more white and start again.

and now i add more black.  i’m messing a little with the cream in the clouds, also.

and now the peninsula was too dark, so i’ve obscured that with some more medium gray atmosphere, and added little dark touches to the upper clouds.

and i guess i’m done.  it needs a thin black frame, an some nice buffing to bring out the shine of the wax, and i’m ready to move on to my next painting.  the series will be called elements – water, or maybe kerry water, tho that sounds like a brand.  or maybe just water and air.  anyway, this is number 1.  now i just need a place to show it.

next painting – clouds raining on the ocean, with a barely visible peninsula in the background.  part 2.

watercolor on clayboard

another experiment with my art materials.  this time jim did me up some homemade clayboard, which means mixing kaolin clay with rabbit skin glue (instead of using marble dust) and painting it on like gesso.  he made one of my new luan panels into a clayboard surface, and i just sat down and made a watercolor out of it.  7 3/4 by 8 inches.  so it’s basically life size.

watercolor not on paper?  watercolor on board?  i scoffed when they had the samples of clayboard out at binders.  it reminded me of watercolor on bristol board, which i think sucks.

but since jim had made the clayboard by hand, and it turned out so smooth and shiny, i couldn’t resist, and so sat down to paint the front porch, as a present for my sister.  which sister, since i’ve promised both of them, and my daughter, one of my watercolors?  the sister who just was sitting there soaking up the 90 degree heat a couple of weeks ago.  it’s going to be consolation for my giving her the marie’s fountain painting (below) to keep only as long as it takes me to get over there and take it away from her to give to its rightful owner.

well, one painting is 20-something inches high, and the other barely rounds out 8 inches.  but she’ll like the one of the porch and too bad about the other one.

clayboard is very absorbent.  jim put 7 coats of kaolin gesso on it, and then scraped it with the edge of a razor blade to smooth it down.  i hit it with a piece of fine wet-dry sandpaper, and then started drawing on it with a pencil.

clayboard is very smooth.  it’s delightful to run my fingers over.  the clay settles down into the surface even better than calcium carbonate – chalk, marble dust – and makes s smoother and more luxurious surface.

it’s highly absorbent.  run a sopping brush over it, and it’ll leave a puddle of water, but then watch the surface suck it in.  it doesn’t evaporate, it gets drawn into the surface of the gesso.  so your brushstroke stays where you put it, and a lot of the usual softening strokes you do with watercolor won’t exactly work here.

i can soften an edge with clear water, but i have to soften and then loosen and then spread the edge, because the edge is somewhere beneath the surface of the clayboard.  that’s how it seems.

at any rate, clayboard is excellent when you want to do detail.  it won’t work for large, wet-in-wet expressions of color and movement, unless you aren’t going to want to rework the stroke or do a lot of adjustments while it’s still wet, because it stays wet about as long as chinese shrimp crackers do.  (ever put your tongue on a shrimp cracker?  those fried pork rind-looking things in chinese restaurants?  don’t.  they’re like some tree mushrooms, and will suck all the moisture out of your tongue and keep sucking.

detail.  clayboard is great for detail.  because it’s so absorbent, i don’t know why because, just because, the strokes you put down stay down, stay sharp and beautiful and pointy.  it’s the reworking that causes trouble.  because with clayboard, everything you put on it will lift.  even staining pigments.  the trick is not to overwork it.

it’s a bit like egg tempera, so jim tells me.  they both dry really quickly, allowing for almost no fucking with.  they’re both really good for persnickety paintings.  you can do a million glazes, but you’ve got to be careful not to lift colors that are down.

another thing that happens differently on clayboard than on paper is that the colors go on in actual layers.  with watercolor, every time you put on a glaze of some color, you’re dissolving all the colors beneath it back into the mix.  apparently not so with clayboard.

this means that the painting remains transparent as long as you’re using transparent pigments.  this gives the painting remarkable snap and depth.

normally in watercolor, ultramarine is my strongest dark, and if i mix it with raw umber it approaches black in strength but doesn’t deaden and overpower like black does on paper.  all this is after years learning how to make strong darks without creating mud.

but on clayboard, something about how it absorbs the pigments, but the colors don’t turn to mud the way they do on paper.  i can put on a layer of blue to shadow the glider seat, but it won’t darken.  it just turns blue.  so i tried to put on a wash of raw umber, and it turned dusty and opaque on me.  umber is not an opaque color.  neither is ultramarine.  but on clayboard they don’t darken the way they do on paper.  they don’t seem to mix, or something.

on clayboard, if i want a clear dark, i have to use black.

this is anathema in watercolor.  but it’s the rule with silk dyes.  if i want a shade of a color, i have to add black in silk work.  if i don’t use black, i won’t get a dark color.  period.  so you learn to use black in silk.  but you leave the whites, just like in watercolor, and many of the techniques are the same.

watercolor on clayboard is supersaturated.  the blues were intense blues, like on silk.  not muted blues as in an oil painting.  the whole thing looked garish.

so the next morning, to finish the painting, i intended to merely glaze a bunch of neutral darks over most of the painting, and sign it.

it took all afternoon.  and what a lovely afternoon it was, all cool and drizzly, with a fine breeze to dry the sweat off my brow as i sat out on the porch and painted my picture.

i noticed as i was washing an earth green over the cobalt wall, trying to tone down all those bright colors, that the lines of the siding were fading.  this happened even more with the next wash.  now, i wasn’t exactly letting the board dry before putting on the next wash, just putting it aside until the pools absorbed in.  so i guess the surface was still wet when i went over it with another wash.  and i guess that made it lift.

so, if you get the surface wet, you can lift anything.  even if you don’t want to.  the lesson here is to leave out the lining and details like that until the surface is the way you want it, don’t outline shit before you’ve finished messing with it.

that’s why the right hand side of the painting looks so rough.  jim disagrees with me on this point, tho.  he says that the scratchy effect is from the underlying gesso not being smooth enough, while i think i’ve gone and raised the grain of the wood underneath.  we have yet to ask the relevant archive questions from our favorite website of art experts.

altogether, i’m very happy watercolor painting on luan plywood clayboard.  it’s cheap as dirt when you make it yourself, and the results are bright and snappy.  i think i’m going to paint a few watercolors with it.  and that’ll get me back painting watercolors, which everyone keeps telling me to do.

another silk scarf

i really do love to paint on silk.  the whole staying inside the lines thing that i get to violate to my heart’s content.  the brilliant colors, the way the whole thing is made out of light, rather than darkness, as with pigments on paper.

this is the composite scarf.  there’s a lot of white in it, but not for very long.  i did the usual outlining of all the flowers, and started painting on them with various greens and flower colors.  that’s going to be the easy part.  the difficult part will be the fairies.  i don’t want them too strong, but i dislike pastel colors, so it gave me a few fits before i figured out what i need to do.

sugar syrup.  karo syrup.  in a squeeze bottle.  it does interesting and strange things to dyes.

so i put sugar syrup around the fairies’ clothes and wings.  i’m leaving them under the fan all night to dry (hopefully, as it’s quite humid here), and then tomorrow i’m going to hit them with some fairly strong dark dye on top of the sugar syrup.  and when i hit them with water later on, they’ll do very interesting things.   the ephemeral touch i’m looking for on the fairies.

* * *

in other news, i’ve just started a test watercolor on a piece of clayboard, and it’s producing nice results.  more later.

more different progress

i consider this finished.  in addition to the blue, i stuck on some more burnt umber on the trees, made the stripes on the palms by scraping some paint away, and took some of the light greens i used on the barn painting and put highlights on the plants.  then i made some van gogh stars to show how full of humidity the horizon was, and put in a couple of vague breaking waves, darkened the porch railing, and that’s it.  i’ll sign the back, and give it to the little kid who suggested it as a painting.

this is the amsterdam boat pastel underpainting, covered in wax paste prior to burning in.  the wax is very goopy because of the orange oil, more than i usually put in so that it would be goopy.  jim makes it up a lot stiffer than i need, so i just add orange oil on the top and come back in a few days to stir it all up as it dissolves.  the reason the wax is so damned opaque is that it hasn’t been burned in yet.

you can see how much clearer the wax is once it’s been melted and allowed to cool once more.  the idea behind the melting is to fuse all the layers of wax together.  this is partly unnecessary when you’re working with wax and citrus solvent mixed together to form a wax paste, because it’s not in layers when you do that, it’s got a solvent in it so the layers dissolve together.  or would, if i didn’t burn them in.  i like the burning in.

some painters use wax paste instead of molten wax (which they call ‘real encaustic TM’).  these soft wax painters come from an artist name of joel reeves who taught this in the late ’50s and early ’60s.  back then, everyone, from karl zerbe to jasper johns used solvents in their wax, but the solvent was turpentine, which is horribly toxic when inhaled as a heated fume.  so nobody does this anymore.  the proponents of ‘real encaustic TM‘ insist that all solvents are bad bad bad, and concentrate on using molten wax.  this means that the wax is heated constantly, and repeatedly, which does bad things to the wax (shortens the molecule chain every time) and puts beeswax and damar fumes into the air.  so the ‘real TM’ crowd hyperventilate their studios using industrial strength fume hoods and osha face masks.  this is a ridiculous overreaction to fumes, you can ask any oil painter who uses solvents.

anyway, we don’t take the safe-at-all-costs stance, and think the ‘real encaustic TM’ crowd are a little off the deep end.  we were taught to use solvents and paste wax, and avoid overheating the beeswax, and so when we discovered orange oil, we were delighted.  it’s mostly nontoxic.  you can eat it.  it makes me hungry to work with it.  the smell is highly pleasant, and i’ve got asthma and so should know if it’s harmful when inhaled.  and it’s not harmful to me.  the msds says it’s gras – generally recognized as safe, but others warn of liver toxicity, so it’s a good idea to have a fan going so the fumes don’t concentrate.  but it’s not going to kill either of us, and the effects you can get with paste wax burned in are tremendous – i can do details.

i’m not sure if i’ll be continuing with the boat and reflections painting, as i’m running out of time to experiment, and this painting isn’t an experiment but a real painting.

note on the luan panels.  i’ve been trying to cut the sheet down into boards, and am having trouble.  the circular saw is too rough and will tear the delicate wood up, so we’re not even trying that.  we tried the hand saw, but it was slow.  i tried a mat knife and it took for fucking ever, and i went out and got cutting blades for my dremel tool, but it would only cut halfway thru, and when i tried to score and snap it, the plywood broke at different places.  so we asked jim’s son michael, a professional woodworker, to cut it for me.  that way i don’t ruin all my panels, just the first four i tried to cut myself.

furthering the progress

today it’s progress on the oil paintings, both on panel and on linen, and starting an encaustic on the new luan panels i cut from a big lumber-store sheet ($1.42 per 16×20 1/4″ panel, can’t beat it).

continuing the oil on panel painting of the beach at night from our cabin, i mixed up a very small amount of phthalo green and put it over the plants.  this will need some toning down, obviously, but i wanted a transparent wash to work from.

then i scraped up some ultramarine blue and mixed some of my white into it, and added some linseed oil, which is the first time i’ve done that.  so far, i’ve been using the calcium carbonate and sun-thickened linseed oil in a tube that jim made up some years ago, and if it needed thinning, i added some orange oil.  but this time i thinned the tube stuff with oil, probably going way too far with the fat over lean rule.  i mean, from orange oil thinner, which is like turpentine in that it evaporates immediately, to a way oily veil of blue and white – there have to be several steps of oilinity that i’ve passed over at once.

after that i mixed up some raw umber, another transparent color, and stuck it over the green, hoping to make it look like proper plants in the almost-darkness.

yesterday i mixed up some chrome green, and some ultramarine green into separate pools, and used each in different parts of the painting to represent the actual things that you can see are green.  there are lots of the painting where what you see isn’t really green, but reads that way.  these are actual green things because they’re either out in full sun, or are catching and reflecting the light while in the shade.  i also mixed up the smallest bit of cadmium red dark and after awhile a little white too, and put it on the barn and in the trees.

when i’d finished putting the sky in on the beach painting, i still had a bit of blue paint left, so i washed it over the sky and the house, and in fact made it stretch over all the background trees.  the result is mainly so spectacular because i let photoshop do the correction automatically, which is usually not the way i do it.  the photo above was done by hand, and you can see there the colors just aren’t right.  the automatic value correction is actually too garish, but at least the colors seem more true.

when i got done with the paintings i’d been working on, i turned my attention to my new luan panels.  this one is 16×20, which is large for the modern encaustic painting, but actually quite small for me.  the reason it’s the size it is is because it’s going in my luggage with me to ireland, and that’s as large a standard size as i can fit into my bag.  will i take all 14 with me?   stay tuned.

this one got a coat of clear acrylic gel medium, my ideas about sealing and priming my surfaces having changed after i lost a goodly amount of wax to the underneath side of my fabric during the previous attempt at encaustic.  i would still be working on panels jim made years ago and stacked against the wall if i weren’t gearing up to go on an artist’s residency, and going cold turkey on my reliance on commercially prepared paint.

at this stage the painting looks like a francis bacon.  i started with charcoal, and quickly ran into trouble, because i didn’t know which lines to mark down.  i was actually trying to represent the white lines by using the black charcoal.  so i got out my pastels, which jim gave me for xmas one year, and started in with the real colors.

and thank god.  there are white lines, and gray ones, sienna walls and prussian glass in the windows, black and brown shadows, and they all follow their own paths in all directions.  it’s a nightmare trying to get all the lines right, because you actually have to draw a web, working in all directions and making all the edges meet.

working in pastel is maybe not the greatest idea, since it’s really hard to rub it out and start over, especially when you’re working with a board that has an incredible amount of tooth once it’s been coated out with acrylic.

i was surprised how quickly i finished the pastel underpainting.  i noticed yesterday, when i was just starting the drawing, that i had an enormous amount of artistic resistance.  looking at the reference photo overwhelmed me immediately, especially when i was trying to draw it in with charcoal.  the complexity is maddening, but the distortions all have a rhythm, and all match up with another distortion in another part of the painting.  it all fits together, and if the proportions aren’t right, it looks awkward.

except you don’t notice, because you don’t have the reference photo to judge by, and one distortion looks like another when it comes to water.  so you won’t notice that the middle-left of the painting is squinched up too much, and i had to compensate by stretching it on the left side.  water could well do that, especially if there was some other disturbance interfering with the interference.

this isn’t the first time i’ve painted this image.  the first was several years ago, in oil on canvas, and 30×40, and hangs in my studio.  so i’ve been looking at it and wanting to do it in wax.  for an exercise painting, to see how well it’s going to work in the field, i really shouldn’t have chosen such a complex painting, one that will take weeks to finish and be every bit as complex in wax as it in in any other medium.

but i had to paint it again, and so i started on in.  it takes pastel really well, and i can see no reason why it won’t take wax even better, so i can stop now, and leave this painting until i get back from europe (or else take it and the reference photo and complete it at the residency).

jim actually painted the image first.  he did it up with acrylic on canvas, 30×40, and i remembered wanting to paint it when i took the photo, so the minute he was done, i grabbed the photo and started my own painting.  for awhile his hung on the studio wall, but then we switched out and now it’s my painting, but we take his back out for comparison when people want to see our work.

jim’s is different from mine.  he took great care rendering the walls and the moss and the boat, and was kind of slapdash about the reflections, whereas i’m not too good at rendering moss and boats and walls, but i get way into reflections and distortions, and mine are much more accurate than his.

after awhile of working on the impossible reflections, i began to notice that they looked like animals, or faces.  that’s our human tendency to make sense our of chaos, and i’ve always done this – after working on a jigsaw puzzle all day i’d go out for a breath of air, look up at the trees, and see giant jigsaw pieces in the treetops where i would normally see treetops, leaves and branches.

i thought last time i did this painting that this time i would paint the animals and never mind making lines out of them.  the eye will do that at a distance anyway.

i may not proceed with this painting, as i only have 3 weeks left to come up to speed with my materials.  i may stick it aside, but i’ll link back to this post if i do.

end of one phase, start of another

i’ve been attempting to make an encaustic painting on top of pelon fastened to foamcore.  pelon is a nonwoven interfacing fabric used in sewing.  foamcore is a lightweight plastic backing material used in picture framing.  neither is recommended for encaustic, but the idea was to use some sort of very lightweight substrate so that i wouldn’t have to haul masonite around in my luggage, which weighs a ton.  the idea was to make encaustic paintings by the bundle, using temporary backing, then peel it off and stack it interleaved with wax paper in order to bring it back home.

in this photo, you’re looking at a half-burned in layer of wax.  on the left, it’s still white and pasty-looking (this is a layer of mostly clear wax with a little bit of titanium white to make a veil).  this is mainly because the wax sort of foams, or whitens, as it’s spread onto the board with a palette knife.  once it’s hit with a grow light (which is the tool i use to burn in, while many others use a heat gun or blowtorch), and the wax melts, it unfortunately absorbs right into the pelon, which is not what i want.

lesson one:  pelon needs to be sized if i don’t want to lose a pound of wax into the fabric.  if i had sealed it with acrylic, i wouldn’t have such an absorbent surface, and i could have started making a waxy surface immediately.

what i’m trying to do here is to build up enough wax so that i have an actual waxy surface, and so far, as i wrote in my last post, it’s taken 6 layers, which is too much.  and it’s looking more crappy with every layer.

this layer, which is cobalt blue, is the first layer to even remotely surmount the pelon substrate.  and i’m not elated at all.

lesson two:  pelon needs to be totally stretched onto the substrate because it tends to loosen when wet.  i thought pelon didn’t stretch out when it got wet.  but it’s like any fabric, it seems.  now it has creases and bubbles, which effects how the wax goes down and what it looks like when it’s burned in.  which is not at all smooth.

another layer, this time a thick one of clear beeswax, because i’m tired of waiting for the wax to build up properly and i’m going to shortcut it with a bunch of wax.  but the trouble with this layer is that i’m going rather easy on the burning in process, hoping that by not hanging around with the light after it goes molten, i might not be encouraging the wax to disappear into the pelon.  or is it going under the pelon?  is the pelon just sort of floating on a thicker and thicker bed of wax?  it’s most frustrating.

the layers might be churning when they’re melting.  i find that when i melt a big pool of wax, sometimes the different layers of pigment start to mix mechanically.  this is bad, because it produces a bland gray area.

what’s not happening is smooth layers of color.  the whole thing is blotchy, no doubt influenced by the creases and bubbles, which seem to  be getting bigger, rather than disappearing under a layer of wax and becoming invisible.

this time i put a layer of clear wax with a little white in it, to veil over the sky and make it more vague and grayed out.  and what’s happening is that i’m not burning the wax all the way in, ie. not making it completely molten when i heat it up.  that leaves areas of ‘raw’ wax, wax that can be spread with a finger after the whole thing cools down.  if you have raw wax, then you don’t have a good seal between layers, you don’t have semitransparency, you don’t have anything but a layer of candle dripping on an otherwise ‘attractive’ painting.

the answer would be to go at it with the heat lamp until that yellow buildup melts and levels.  but at this point i’ve got a waxy buildup on my surface, which is what i want.  and by the time i reheat that unmelted wax, it’s going to be running all over the painting instead of staying in place like a nice little painting.

my frustration level is thru the roof.  at this point i’m trying to proceed with the process simply to find out how hard it will be to get what i want, and since this exercise is all about learning how to use lightweight materials to make a painting, i don’t really need to go thru the fine details with black, which is the next big step to be taken once i’ve got a good background, because black and white are the hardest colors to work with in encaustic (black melts first, white melts last, so you’ve got to be strategic about using them.)

okay, i’ve had enough.  the colors you see in this final stage are because i finally put the painting outside to photograph it.  the previous shots are all taken in the studio under artificial light, and often with a flash, and i’m not an expert in photoshop color correction.  so.

like i said, i’ve had enough.  you can see the ‘raw’ beeswax on the left.  it’s still yellow.  at this point i’ve drawn a finger thru it and realized it was still uncured, un-burned-in.  so i grabbed one side of the pelon and peeled the painting away from the substrate.  on the right is the foamcore i had the pelon pinned to.

the foamcore layer is quite interesting.  the wax sure did go right thru the damned pelon and accumulated on the substrate, which is useless because you can’t see it.  it’s got better color, tho, and these little tiny pinprick holes where the wax didn’t go thru.  you can’t see most of these holes in the picture, but they’re very interesting.  they look like a sky full of stars, which is kind of where i was going with this.  the streaks are what was under the creases and bubbles, and the white parts at the top are where the wax stuck to the back of the pelon and lifted from the foamcore.

so really, a complete failure, and a good thing i’m spending this month testing my materials, or i’d be up shit’s creek.  tomorrow i’m going to home depot for a 4′x8′ sheet of luan, which i will cut into 8x10s and 16x20s, which will fit into my suitcase, and i can (hopefully) happily make paintings from this.  so i scraped both surfaces clean and put the wax into a container with a little orange oil to dissolve it.  i’ll use it as gunge when i make another planet painting.

so that’s it for the pelon on foamcore experiment.  it was a failure.  fine.  but i learned a lot.

now i’m going to turn my attention back to my oil painting, which i’m also trying to come up to speed on.  in a prior post i showed my progress painting a beach at night scene in oil on panel, in this case masonite, for a friend.  i got the first layer on two days ago, and i’m still waiting for it to be tacky enough to proceed with, which had me all panicky the other day – how am i supposed to finish a bunch of oil paintings and pack them up wet to take home?

but i thought about it, and amn’t going to be painting oil on panel during my residency.  i’m going to be painting oil on linen, because i’m taking a roll of 6 yards of linen that i bought ten years ago and have never used.  and i’ve never actually painted on linen, so i got two 8×10 stretched and primed canvases out from jim’s stash and started in on them with another material i’ve never used before, conte crayons.

to illustrate the point i made in my last post, where i said that the trouble with pastels is that when you fix them all the chalk turns clear.  pastellists hate this, but that’s why i don’t like pastels – they’re too pastelly, too pasty.  there’s too much chalk in them and they look chalky.  if i were to do pastels, i would fix the shit out of them to get rid of that awful pastel look.  i’m just a rebel.

so here is the preliminary tonal drawing in unfixed conte crayon.  it’s an upstate new york farmhouse and barn in the misty morning, and it’s quite a nice reference photo that i’d been meaning to tackle for some time.  what i’ve done is the usual, indicating the various shades of light and darkness.  it’s rough, but good enough for me to start with.

now when i fix it with a dilute acrylic sprayed on with a mouth atomizer, you can see where i’ve lost a lot of the brightness.  that’s because the chalk is now transparent, as it should be.  the chalk is a filler.  it would be insanely expensive to make pastels using only pigment and gum tragacanth (the binder), so you need to extend the pigment using an inert filler – a filler that bulks out the pastel without changing its working characteristics.  the fact that there’s chalk in the filler, and that this chalk shows in unfixed paintings, is or should be irrelevant.  but pastellists strive to make the painting look good while it’s being painted, and don’t seem to get that it’s supposed to darken when you fix it, and that you’re supposed to fix it.  so there’s a huge tendency in pastel painting to try and avoid fixing, instead of adjusting to the process by making your colors more intense in preparation for fixing.  but never mind.  i don’t paint in pastel because it’s too pastel and i like sharper colors.

here is the first layer of paint on top of the fixed conte drawing.  i started with chrome green and white, thinned with orange oil (the fat over lean rule, start thinning with turpentine, or in this case orange oil solvent and in the next layers add more oil).  i put this into the grayed out treeline in the distance.  then i mixed up some viridian with a tiny bit of white and put it in the middle ground.  at this point i ran right out of my viridian, so i had to mix up some more.

the tip of the palette knife full of viridian dry pigment, a scrape of the mixture of calcium carbonate and sun thickened linseed oil i’m using as filler, mix that together and add a brushfull of orange oil.  i put this second batch of stronger paint into the foreground.  then i mixed just a little ultramarine blue into the viridian and put it in the middle-ground trees.  and then i came back with  more blue and put it in the shadows of the background trees, and in the foreground in the shadows of the plants.

then i took what little tiny bit of raw umber i still had on my palette from two days before when i did the beach scene, and mixed it into the blue shadows in the trees and on the side of the barn.

i mixed up a teeny tiny bit of burnt sienna and put it in the barn, and then took my white and did the house and the sky.  and since i didn’t feel like mixing up any more black yet, i stuck what was left of the white on the roof of the barn.

now i have my first layer of paint, which needs to dry before i can start in on a second layer.  i expect this to be dry tomorrow when i go down to the studio, because this is how i expect oil paint to react.  but then, i know what to expect when i use paints right out of the tube, and this isn’t one of those times.  this time i have mixed up my own paints, and know every ingredient in them, unlike with tubed paints, where you have no fucking clue what the manufacturer has put into the paint.  there could be driers in the paint, which make it tacky quicker.  there could be a bunch of things in there.

progress on the paintings

i’m tired of doing things the commercially approved way.  i don’t like wearing fashionable clothing, i don’t like being a consumer, i don’t like living in air conditioning.  i also don’t like painting the modern way.  i don’t want to squeeze my paints out of a tube that i don’t know what’s in it, i want to mix everything from scratch.  the way the old masters painted.

of course, this comes with its own pricetag.  the learning curve is what i’m talking about.  there’s a big difference in the way paint goes on when you do it the commercially approved way, and when you mix it up yourself.  all the paint manufacturers go on about how buttery the paint is, how little filler they use.  one manufacturer claims to use no fillers at all.  just pigment and linseed oil.

but when i mix up pigment and linseed oil on my palette, i get a gloppy, thin syrup.  that’s why i abandoned the oil painting experiment i started at the beach.  no body whatsoever.  not without fillers.

above is the oil painting i’m working on.  it’s the beach as seen from our screened-in porch, at night.  it’s on a panel, and i’m mixing up my paints from dry pigments, calcium carbonate (chalk or marble dust) and linseed oil.  as you can see within the glare off the flash, it’s not dry yet.  there are drips.  that’s what i noticed first when i looked at it this morning.  it’s still wet, not just tacky.  there was no way i could continue it this morning.  i just have to let it dry.

my question to jim was what made all the difference?  when i was using oil paint that came in tubes and cost big bucks, i got this thick, buttery consistency right out of the tube, and i hated using any thinner on it at all because i just loved the consistency.  i could put it on and it would stay right where i put it and look great.  when i used the stuff i mixed up at the beach, it slopped and ran and bled out all over the place.

the difference is fillers.  a mixture of pigment and oil, unless you use a shitload of pigment, is going to be syrupy.  so you add an inert filler that disappears into the oil.  did you know that chalk turns transparent when you wet it?  it doesn’t just wash away, it disappears.  how’s that for invisible ink?  can you just see kids making use of sidewalk chalk that way?  this is the reason why pastel artists hate to use fixative.  one pass with the spray can and all the light colors just disappear into the paper substrate.

but in oil paints, it’s great.  i can add a bunch of ground chalk (marble, limestone, calcium carbonate) and make the paint as thick and bodyful as i like, and it’s as simple as that.

so to yesterday’s line of little cups of handmixed paint – titanium white, ultramarine blue, raw umber, and carbon black – i added a little pile of chalk to mix into the paint to thicken it.

perhaps tomorrow i can start putting glazes on, and add a bit of color.

this pitiful example of a painting is the encaustic version of the same scene.  yesterday i got a piece of pelon, cut it to the wrong size (too short to fully wrap around), and with a slight rip in it, and mounted it not exactly tightly.  evidently pelon shrinks.  evidently you have to stretch it when you stretch it, because it loosens way up once you start putting wax down.

i’m learning a lot doing this.  all the mistakes i’m making and all the consequences they will have during the making of this painting, these are all very instructive things i’m doing.  it’s painful.

i’m not liking this method.  for one thing, it’s on pelon.  i should probably try muslin tomorrow, that’s jim’s suggestion.  another reason to hate it is because i’m working with foamcore as the substrate.  it’s stiff, and that’s good for a substrate, but it’s light, and i can feel a dent already where i have put the wax of the ocean, that greenish horizontal stripe in the middle-ish of the painting.

pelon seems to be highly absorbent.  i still, after many layers, don’t have the shine of wax.  my layers so far:

1. the original blocking in of color – an old grayed blue from the palette, the greenishness of palette scrapings dissolved into orange oil, and the dark brown of raw umber on the bottom third where all the vegetation is going to be.

2. a layer of beeswax with only a veil of titanium white in it, over the sky and the sea.

3. another veil of white in the middle, over the lower sky and the upper sea, and a layer of brown microcrystalline wax and raw umber over the upper sky and the lower sea.

4. a thin layer of cobalt blue over the sky and sea, making it act as a transparent pigment, which it isn’t when used thickly.

5. another veil of white over the entire sky and sea.

6. and another veil of white.

i burned in each layer, and watched as the wax melted on top of the pelon, turn completely molten, and then sink into the pelon, leaving only the texture of the fabric, which is a mat of small fibers.

so this sucks.  how much wax do i have to use to begin to get a wax buildup that i can buff?

i’ve had that problem before, when i tried to do a very persnickety little encaustic painting of a greek orthodox icon over cotton.  i ended up scorching the fabric, and the fine details of the faces and clothing was very difficult with all that texture to bump over.

i’m sorry, i want a smooth surface to start my encaustic paintings on.  but masonite‘s too damned heavy to carry in my luggage.  i want luan panels, but i don’t want to go to an art supply store and pay retail for the damned things.

i’ll try the muslin next, and go back to home depot to see if they don’t sell luan.

i’m having real trouble representing the night with its most subtle colors, but maybe i can get to that later.  right now i’m tired, and think i’ll try going back to bed.

thumbs up – more increments

today, the baby was off with the other side of the family, and i could sit and work – or sit and not work – to my heart’s content.  so i spent happy hours sitting there staring at my painting, drowning in cups of coffee.

i started on the front cake plate.  that represents my hardest bit, and i like to get that out of the way first.  but really all i did was to put in an line representing the left side of the cover where it bisects the waiter’s head.

then i moved to the front of the counter and got the receipt and rolled up silverware.  then i got the coffee maker some, putting in the red highlights and painting in the cover of the filter box.  and kept on with the red, splashing it liberally (see how small those threadlike reds are?) over the counter underneath the coffee warmer.

i had a particular problem, one i’ve encountered a few times in this painting.  between the edge of the coffee warmer and the stack of bread is a white thingie, and there’s what looks like a milk steamer arm that you’d find on an espresso maker, poking into the white space with its hard-edged metal nozzle.  so i spent quite a while trying to resolve that.

this makes my eyes hurt.  i really should use a tripod…

i had originally left a white space at the right edge of there the stack of bread is, because i read the white thingie into the drawing twice.  i do that.  and i know at the time that it’s only going to have to be redone – at a cost – later.  a co-employee, many ranks uphill from me, once told me that my attention to detail sucked.  he was right, of course.  i should have been an abstract expressionist.

you can see the spout in the picture above.  i had to restate the shadow under the breadplate, and put some burnt sienna into the wooden bread board (further defining the cloth that hangs over the edge (but i can see now that it’s wrong and will have to be redone)).  then i went a little nuts with the red, like i said.  but suddenly i could see red all over the reference photo, and it’s when i start to paint what i see that i paint well.

there are two schools of thought on this.  the one says you have to forget what something’s supposed to look like, and just paint what you see.  and the other says you have to inform what you see with what you know is there.  i have learned from bitter experience that i really should follow the latter path.  but i love the flowing feeling when i paint what i see without thought.

after that i went back toward the middle of the painting, and mostly finished the creams and things in the front of the painting, and got the bottles and jars in front of the waiters to the left.  and then i noticed another problem, and got out the toothbrush to carefully scrub the place underneath the left-hand waiter’s left arm, because i just now figured out what it represented.

the area under the one waiter’s arm is actually the other waiter’s two hands, one holding a ticket and the other writing something with a white pen.  it fills the space under the one waiter’s arm, but i had drawn it in about half that size.

the scrubbed area didn’t get very light.  in fact, it’s pretty dull.  and so the highlights have to be very dull as well.  so i just outlines the fingers with red and put a few dabs of sienna on the planes of the hand and left it at that.  it’s good enough, and i probably don’t have to do anything more to it.

then the last thing i did was to put some color on the waiter on the left.  burnt sienna, and some red on her face and neck.

in this way i’ve whittled down what needs to be done to finish this painting.  it’s going nice and fast, mainly because i’m trying not to overwork it, and soon i will be done.

and then – what to do with my palette?  it’s a giant plastic palette with wells for a couple of dozen watercolors, and each well is filled with as much of a tube as i could squeeze out.  i’m running out of burnt umber, it’s true, but when i’m done with this painting i’ll have this massive palette full of paint, and no real desire to use it again.

i’ve moved to making my own paints, and i don’t want to use someone else’s mix that is anyway many years old.  i want to make my paints every day, or every painting, or at least every time i run out of paint.  so i’m thinking maybe i’ll give my palette to my kid, along with my entire collection of watercolors in tubes.  this is an important step.  she already has my travel watercolor kit, which my dad gave me when i was her age.  maybe she’s not enough of an artist yet to use it, and maybe it’d be better in the studio where jim and i can watch over it (instead of it getting pitched in a hurry when she ducks rent and leaves town, kind of thing).  we’ll see.  but the next watercolor i do is going to be all made from scratch from dry pigments and gum arabic.  i’m looking forward to it.  it’s going to be a learning curve, but i love a challenge.

thumbs up – slash and dash

looking at the unfinished painting, my eye is distracted by the top and bottom of the picture plane.  the stools and counter are only under construction, and the ceiling is a few major shades too light, and these incompletenesses make it difficult to see how to proceed.

so, where i would normally save the large washes of darks for the end, to tie everything together, i’m finding that i have to do a lot of the slashing and dashing at this point instead.  i’m sure i’ll have to do more in the end, but right now it’s kind of anticlimactic because you want the flash and dash to make an impression on your audience – a how did she do that – and at this point it’s just one more area of darks that you can’t really tell has been worked on.  oh well, so much for drama.

today’s (yesterday’s) work just gave me more millions of tiny things to do.  here i’ve refined the reflections on the kick panel and the shadows on the stools.  i’m trying to retain the highlights on the vertical slats of the counter panel, but you can see how little luck i’m having over the top of the reds.  i’m still going to have to scrape those lines white and then tone them back down before i’m done.

after filling in more of the details of the counter kick panel and stools, slow incremental work, i got to take out my large squirrel mop, wet down the ceiling, and start charging in color.  i wet the right half first, using clear water, and then put in lots of burnt sienna, then into that i charged a bunch of burnt umber, and then a little ultramarine blue (which darkens unbelievably well), and then some moonglow.

it’s hard to see it in the shot above, but the dark mess in the middle is just about as close to mud as i can come and get away with it.  it doesn’t show well here, but when pigments turn to mud they get a heavy, lifeless appearance that really detracts from the painting.  this means i have to stop now, in this area at least.

over on the left side, i did the same thing, but a heavier application of burnt sienna and nowhere near as much blue and black.

one interesting thing here.  you can see some splotches in the left hand part of the ceiling that i just painted.  they aren’t paint spots, they showed up when the paper was wet and didn’t go away when it dried.  that means they’re some kind of damage or contamination of the paper.  since this painting has been variously in my portfolio or thumbtacked to my studio wall for the past six years, it’s been exposed to everything from grease to smoke to mold, and this is the result.  stained paper.  mold spots.  areas that once wet, won’t dry, like the little circles of what should be white on the right side of the ceiling.  they were supposed to be recessed lights shining out of the ceiling, and i carefully painted around them every time, but with the paper in the condition it’s in, the wetness spread into the dry area, and the pigment followed it.  this also happened around the bottom of the light fixture in the middle, and i had to seriously sponge and blot to get the burnt sienna to fade back out.

this is a conservation problem.  i can’t find the reference at amien.org right now, but these little spots are why you keep watercolor paper in a quiet, dry, dark place away from contaminants.

anyway, in this case they’re just going to add some texture.  but the tendency of the water to crawl into dry spaces is really annoying.

here’s the whole thing at this stage.  by filling in the whites and lights in the floor and ceiling, i’ve managed to show just how much work the middle needs.  in fact, all the details that will make the painting are in the middle of the painting, and they are all the things i’ve been avoiding by doing the periphery first.  so now i have to go back and tackle them.

the first things, i think, will be the cake plates, because they’re the things that’re going to give me the most trouble.  then i can finish the cook’s stove and the counter behind kavanique next, and the stuff on the shelves to the right, and then get the stuff on the counter in the middle, then finish the stools and tone down the counter kick panel, and find somewhere to sign the damned thing.  the frame will probably have to be rather massive, and with this kind of complexity it’s going to need a wide mat.  i’ll be gluing and varnishing it as i have been with my watercolors, but i think i’ll frame it behind glass at first, because i’m planning on hanging it in the diner itself, and seeing if anyone wants to pay loads of money for it.  they won’t, of course, but they’ll probably be happy to hang it for a few months.