From Her Voice Came The Music of the Centuries

 

 From Her Voice Came The Music of the Centuries

collage, 11x14 inches

Click on image to enlarge

This is my latest collage from the Penny Dreadful series. In this one, a Victorian lady is singing into a very early cylinder phonograph that is powered by weights/counterweights located under the table while a mummy listens with rapt attention. Though it is hard to tell in the photograph, the sky is painted in iridescent white and some of the white is mixed with the gold in the mummy. When the light hits both the sky and the mummy just right, they glow.

In the detail above, one can easily see the transparent glazes painted over the image. I don't like to obscure the engraver's lines if I can help it. As I look at this, it seems to me that the detail image is a composition in its own right which I may explore in the near future. Regrettably, I've forgotten the make and model of this particular phonograph but it is an actual recording/playback device from the 19th Century.

 

The mummy was just too good not to use in something. I particularly enjoyed the rather rapt expression on his face. I painted him with a mixture of transparent yellow, renaissance gold and a bit of iridescent white to give him that supernatural quality. He appears to be listening deeply to something and I couldn't resist combining the mummy with the phonograph lady. I'm also endlessly fascinated by thin the veil between the Past and the Present can possibly be.

As I look at both of the detail images, I'm thinking of actually turning this into a triptych and find a way to frame all three images together. I'd love to know your thoughts about this. 

The Threshold of the Soul and other works

The Threshold of the Soul, 2010, acrylic and coloured pencil on D'Arches 140 lb. hot press watercolour paper, 22x28 inches.

Click on any image to enlarge.

For this blog, I have one new painting and two collages. The painting, The Threshold of the Soul, has been a long time coming. I started this painting in the autumn of 2007 not long after setting up my studio in Paris,  KY. It went through a long gestation period after I initially pencilled out the figure. The background went through massive changes from what had been originally drawn in my sketchbook and transferred to the larger watercolour paper sheet. It is also my first painting of a friend of mine who I regard with considerable respect and the utmost esteem. She is a writer and a person who has given much thought to the journey of Life and where she is on that journey. Without her, I don't think I would have done this particular painting quite this way. 

She stands at a portal between light and dark. It is not a literal landscape where I have clearly violated the rules about how light and dark are supposed to interact with each other but instead it is a landscape of the soul. The figure who stands at this portal is deciding whether she wants to spend a life in the light/happiness or a life in the dark/melancholy. She is more present in the light because that is where she wants to be, yet she knows she cannot fully enjoy the light before her without the dark behind her.

And So I Was Summoned From The Etheric Void, 2010, collage, 11x14 inches.

Sometimes the title comes to mind before the actual image does, and in this case, the collage is a rethinking of an earlier idea that failed in terms of composition which as it turned out was a blessing in disguise. I am fascinated by 19th Century fiction especially if it is Gothic with its attendant mysteries and overall spookiness. I also like the images to suggest stories in the viewer's mind that may have both occurred to me and not occurred to me. Is the man whose face floats overhead a ghost or is he someone who has crossed a quantum/inter dimensional void? Who is the man with the floating hat and number pinned to his chest? What are his powers and what does he use them for? What of the lady standing next to him? Does she fear the man being summoned? Or does she fear the summoner? That is for you to decide.....

I Have Loved You For So Very Long, 2010, collage, 11x14 inches

For this collage, I have a great weakness for stories involving the theme of Love Across Time. The clues here are the colours of the men's clothes and the colour of the woman's hair and her dresses. Each romance takes place within the shadow of the Gothic tower in the background as a man strides happily towards his lady love who awaits him at the outer door. In the foreground are all the past times this couple have loved each other.

Coming next: I am working on a collage set near the Sphinx and the Pyramids as an unwrapped mummy listens in utter rapture to a Victorian lady speaking or perhaps singing into a very early phonograph recording her voice onto a wax cylinder. My brother saw this one in progress and liked it very much. I may do a second possibly somewhat larger version for him.

Painting in Progress-conclusion

Click on any image to enlarge

With this installment we end where we began, the model's face because I want every element of the composition to pull the viewer back to her face because without her, this becomes a rather odd landscape instead of what it actually is, a meditation on whether to live a life of light or of dark or to put another way, a life of happiness or melancholy perhaps a blending of both.

In the close up above, I had started out with using coloured pencil as an underpainting and then going over it with a thin mix of acrylic. In the previous blog, I was not happy with the way that looked so I went over the paint with a new layer of coloured pencil and used the pencil to blend areas as well as to lightly indicate shadowed areas. The lower lip was partially painted out and corrected. The eyelashes were also done with coloured pencil along with loose strands of hair drawn over the painted areas. The combination of the pencil and the paint bring the face up to the same level as the rest of the painting. The pencil alone was too thin to give her the same weight as the rest of the composition.

 Other touches include foliage at the lower left of the painting and the finishing of the pathway to the colonnade in the daylight portion at the top. Some additional texturing was included in the wall and column. At some point in the near future, I will probably pull this painting out of the frame and work on the ivy a good bit more as I am not totally satisfied with it but at some point have to stop working on the painting I started two and a half years ago. Below is the(for the moment) finished painting:

Pre-Raphaelite Paintings at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville

 click on the images below to enlarge

Last Saturday, Valerie and I had the humbling experience of travelling to Nashville to see some Pre-Raphaelite paintings that were part of a travelling exhibit at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. I won't try to cover all of the paintings we saw there but needless to say it was more than worth the drive. Information on the exhibit is at the link below.
http://www.fristcenter.org/site/exhibitions/exhibitiondetail.aspx?cid=793

It was Valerie's first viewing of a Rossetti and our first museum trip together so it was quite a significant event for us. The painting above is one of Rossetti's later works where he mostly focused on images of solitary women painted in very lush surroundings. This painting is called Dis Manibus, or Roman Widow. The model for this painting is Alexa Wilding and was one of Rossetti's favourite models towards the end of his life.

The painting above is by William Holman Hunt and is called Miss Gladys M. Holman Hunt (The School of Nature). Miss Holman Hunt was 16 at the time of the original sitting and when the model's face was retouched later by the equally incredible Pre-Raphaelite artist, Arthur Hughes, he aged her face a few years. I may edit this post later as I find out more about this. This painting is an example of how Holman Hunt followed the early Pre-Raphaelite painting principles throughout his life, the fidelity to nature, the bright colours even I can see, and yet, as Valerie pointed out to me, as realistic as the dog is painted, a close up examination reveals the animal is painted in a technique very closely resembling pointillism. It would be interesting to find out if the trends of late 19th Century art had any effect on this early to mid Victorian artist.

We also saw three of Sir Edward Burne-Jones Briar Rose series paintings displayed together. There was a bench situated in front of them. We needed it. Seeing them together was an emotional experience that at the moment defies my ability to describe it. This painting is called The Sleeping Beauty.

Why was it a humbling experience? For the last thirty years, these are some of the artists I've looked to in finding my own way as a painter. No amount of looking in books can prepare you for seeing the real thing. What strides I've made in my own work seem to pale in the reality of those who came before me. You can also see the benefits of a 19th Century English Royal Academy training in giving one the tools to paint what the heart's eyes see. Yet there are things that connect us in mundane ways. Years ago, I was looking at a watercolour by Rossetti and discovered he was using exactly the same D'Arches hot press watercolour paper I was using. The same paper that had been made literally since 1492.

There have been times after viewing such work, that I wonder why I continue to paint my strange little pictures and not paint for a few days, but then I don't give up easily. I may never reach the same skill level possessed by these artists of another time, but we do share a love of painting a beautiful romantic world that may have never existed except perhaps in the quantum reality of art.

Painting in Progress Part III

In this part, I am starting to pull things together. Additional ivy has been added near the base of the column and the decorative element below. I don't consider it complete yet, I may add more leaves and try to build up the density of growth at the lower left. For this round, I've added lighter colour leaves over some of the darker background leaves. I also worked in the some of the darker green into the stone behind the leaves. Click on any image to enlarge.

In the picture above, you can also see the additional glazes of vermilion red, permanent alizarin crimson in the lower skirt. Some of the red and crimson is mixed together. The lighter part of the skirt is drybrushed. The idea is the lighter colour is a different texture than the horizontal darker fabric near the bottom of the skirt.

In the picture below, you can see where I have started to glaze a mix of raw sienna and yellow ochre into the model's hair. The hue deepens with addition of the glaze. The strands of hair drawn in coloured pencil is still visible through the glaze. The work I had done on the skirt has also been done to the tunic. The shadows are a bit exaggerated so I don't lose them as I build up the rest of the colour. At this point, I've done nothing yet to the skin tones on the face or hands other than what was originally put down in coloured pencil.

The picture below is a close up showing the glazes in the hair and the original coloured pencil rendering of the face. I like it, except that now that everything else has been built up to a certain level leaving an area only in coloured pencil seems weak compared to the rest of the painting. I'm now treating the original pencil work as an underpainting to the acrylic that will be applied over it.

In the final picture for this segment is the model's face with the first bit of paint over the coloured pencil. At this stage, I'm not happy with it at all. This is where my colour blindness rears its exasperating head. The initial mix is titanium white, yellow ochre, burnt sienna with the tiniest amount of cadmium red. Cadmium has extremely strong tinting powers. Even the tiniest amount I had used was probably still too much.

As I work more on the face, the goal is to first get the colour mix under control with the idea of getting it as close as possible to the model's actual skin tones. The coloured pencil actually did that quite nicely. The more challenging problem is to do that with the paint because when I am finished I want to be sure that the viewer is drawn towards the model's face. At the time of this writing, I have not yet attempted to work another layer of colour pencil over the paint. If I like the results of that, I'll use the pencil to smooth and blend the face. If not, I will continue adjusting the mix until I get it right. In order to achieve that, I will test out the mixes on a separate piece of watercolour paper and hold them next to the face to avoid the risk of overworking.

The next entry will focus entirely on her face.

Painting in Progress Part II

Well, this has taken longer to get to than I imagined. Have to stop working on the painting long enough to write about it. I mentioned in the previous blog entry that I used isopropyl alcohol to blend my coloured pencil pigment. In the picture below you can see the two main items I used to do the blending. An old towel and the alcohol itself.

Note that all of the easel images have some parallex error because I hand held the camera and the easel itsel is not quite level. Click on any image to enlarge.

In the next image, you can see that I have wrapped the towel around the end of my finger and then soaked it in alcohol. I begin by rubbing the towel into the pencilled area. You can see the difference between the blended area and the non blended area by the softness of the colour and the pencil strokes.
For finer blending work, I recycle old colourless blender markers by dipping them in the same alcohol. I also will pour some alcohol into a small cup and let multiple old blender soak up the alcohol while I'm using another one. For future use, I'll also pour a tiny amount of alcohol into the caps before snapping them in place.

The old colourless blenders are ideal for blending colour in tight places, in this case the area around the model's hand.

After working the colourless blender into the wall, I go back and add some additional layers of coloured pencil using a Derwent watercolour pencil which is well suited to blending techniques.

Once I've added enough of the coloured pencil to build up the texture I'm going after with the wall I then add a glaze of yellow ochre over it. If I keep it thin, it will still allow the pencil strokes to show underneath. Too much of the hue will make it opaque. In some areas this is actually desirable, but not here. Because I may possibly add other layers of pencil over the glaze, I use water instead of glazing medium to thin the yellow ochre down.


It's helpful to me to not get too fixated on any one area so I shift from working on the wall to working on the background. The background is a mix of the coloured pencil with acrylic. I probably should have mentioned this earlier but I had actually messed up the alignment of the blocks and painted the wall entirely and started over.


Continuing with other parts of the background, I begin roughing in colour and detail on the stone floor behind the figure. I'm using a mixture of indigo blue coloured pencil along with the yellow ochre and golden brown watercolour pencil. This gets a little terra cotta pencil added to it and then a thin glaze of transparent burnt sienna.


You can see here by the time I had taken this photo, I had developed the column and the wall a good bit more. You can also see a decision I had made about the background over the figure's shoulder. This area was done with indigo blue coloured pencil with washes of ultramarine blue mixed with burnt umber. I spatter what I intend to be stars to represent night. After looking at it awhile, I decide I don't really like it. So I paint it out and start over.


Before I had experimented with the star background, my original thought was to extend the colonnade in the daytime background into the night time background. I rough this in with a white coloured pencil and use a very thin iridescent white for the clouds and the moon. The trees are a pthalo green blue shade with some white highlights. I draw the mortar of the brick with a white coloured pencil and then fill with burnt sienna.


The wall gets new attention in the form of ivy painted with a dark hooker's green. In this view, you can see where the painting is heading. The hardest decision I now have to make is what colour the figure's dress should be. I will work out the final details on the dress and then decide the colour. For colour blind people, colour decisions can sometimes be excruciating.



The next installment will get into working more on the figure herself and seeing how the colour choice I make for her attire pulls everything together and puts the focus where it needs to be on the central figure's face.

A Painting in Progress--part one

Finally, I get around to writing a blog about a painting in progress from a technical standpoint. This is a painting of a friend of mine who is standing at a doorway between day and night. The majority of my work is done on canvas but I still enjoy working on Arches hot press watercolour paper mostly in the 140 lb weight but prefer 155 or 300 lb hot press when I have it.

Paintings done on watercolour paper are quite different from my canvases because I work with both coloured pencil and the acrylic together. The coloured pencil provides a sort of underpainting and a lot of interesting texture in its own right. I used to work only in coloured pencil using solvents. I don't obliterate the coloured pencil with the acrylics. The acrylics are often used as a transparent glaze over the coloured pencil. If I keep the acrylics thin enough, more coloured pencil can be added and the layers can build up between the pencils and the glazes.

click on image to enlarge

In the view above, one can see that the painting is started with a drawing in pencil on the paper. I work out the figure, the clothing and the overall composition of the painting before adding the first layer of colour. The area behind the figure which represents Night started as multiple layers of indigo blue that are blended with isopropyl alcohol using a small cloth to work the pigment into the paper. This gives it a nice grainy texture but it wasn't dark enough so I mixed a batch of ultramarine blue and burnt umber into a thin glaze and went over the area again. While the initial glazes remained thin, I added an additional layer of the indigo blue coloured pencil to keep the grainy texture present. After about four layers, I stop.

click on image to enlarge

In the close up view above, look at the top edge of the painting you can see where the coloured pencil and the acrylic glazes spill off the edge. I'm debating with myself whether to extend the composition all the way to the top of the sheet or leave it as is so it fits a standard 22x28 inch frame.

To the figure's left is a wall of a building. The wall began with layers of yellow ochre and golden brown before thin glazes of yellow ochre acrylic were applied. I kept it rougher so that the wall would appear aged. At this stage, I am not too concerned with the edge of the wall. That will tighten up somewhat as the texture of the wall takes on more depth. As the painting progresses, it will become more apparent that it is some kind of stonework with vines and ivy and other foliage on top.

click to enlarge

To the left of my friend's face, the texturing of the wall behind the column is more apparent. Her hair is a mixture of the golden brown coloured pencil and glazes of yellow ochre with some sienna brown coloured pencil added for depth. The face is a mixture of light peach, carmine red, sienna brown, indigo blue and white.

Acrylic paint is the Winsor and Newton Finity series and coloured pencils are either the Prismacolour brand or Derwent watercolour pencils.

The painting started out attempting to use a photo I have of a young girl standing at a door that opens into some kind of structure that is part of a Victorian photo studio backdrop but scale it up to adult proportions for the figure model I wanted to feature. Scaling up the proportions caused other problems that I wasn't ready to solve so I kept the column the girl was leaning on and discarded the rest. Perhaps in a future painting. Either way, I wanted to explore the idea of standing on the edge between Day and Night which I'll take up later as the painting is finished.

I'll be glad to answer any technical questions as I can. I don't believe in keeping technical secrets when it comes to how I do my paintings. What I've learned from others I find a way to make my own. I would expect others to make their own anything I share.

Over the coming weeks, future posts will take up where this one leaves off in recording the progress of this painting. I actually had started it in the autumn of 2007 and it seemed that it needed a long gestation period but now it feels like it's coming together now. Sometimes what seemed hard at the time will make me wonder why now when it seems so much easier...