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  I’ve been working in the lab again to finish up the distillation of the oak leaves. To pull the essence of the leaves from the alcohol we set up a condensing chamber which evaporated the heated steam of the alcohol and let it drip into a flask. leaving the oils behind  because they will boil at a higher temperature. While getting the temperature stable I was struck by the “tears” of condensation in the tower as the liquid crept across the glass, very pretty.

These tears correspond to the Sun and the Moon, where the upward motion of the drops in the moon may indicate separation, while the downward motion in the Sun might indicate reflux.

  Here’s the wiped out skeleton with his fully white wings. I’ve turned the image into black and white so I could see how much contrast I’m going to need when I get into putting detail into the bones and pull them forward from the wings.

I really like where the paint dripped in a long trail from the bottom of the wing on the right side, but I wonder if I want to leave those random drippy marks in the finished painting – it has been so overdone for such a long time.

He’s beginning to take shape now – I’m getting a sense of the challenges posed by this stark white on white. Having decided to look at flowers as a foreground, with blue skies behind him, how will the whites fare against the colours? I suspect that I’ll have to mute them back a lot, but perhaps the contrast between a colourless death with the liveliness of nature will work effectively. Zinc white might become very important pretty soon.

Here’s a scary intermediate stage, showing a layer of white going over the first layer of the skeleton. Obviously I’ll cover the right side wing as well, then I’ll use a clean rag to take this off of the rendering of the skeleton, but letting the edges soften into the white background of the wing feathers. Soon I’ll get into the far more detailed and careful fixing stage, when the left hand will get smaller, the right leg will move a touch to the left, and the bones will become far more detailed. I need to paint the first layer of the skulls too, which will doubtless be a lot of work.  

It’s going to take a day or two for the white to dry, so when I’ve finished this up I’ll move over to the Fortitude piece, which has been patiently waiting for some work on the bear.

Some good news – I’m moving into a house right next to campus, so I have no commute! Fantastic! I’m looking for room-mates. I want the house to be yoga and organic friendly, open minded and light filled.

Since my last post I have sketched twenty five skulls beneath the feet of the skeleton, completed the first draft of his legs and hands and calculated the golden section. It’s been a fun weekend!

I decided to draw the skulls in white pencil rather than going straight in with paint so that I could keep track of some of the more fiddly transitions between each individual. 

I’m continuing to sketch in the skeleton’s legs this morning, and contemplating the  multitude of skulls upon which he stands with some trepidation, just because there are so many of them. I should get pretty good at painting human bones with this kind of workload!

This layer has all been about sketching the structure of the skeleton – now that its in place and mostly correct I’ll start making things accurate and placing the details of the bones onto it. The wings are going to be interesting to do, if only because of their scale.

Visitors to the studio keep asking about what I plan to do in the background. The obvious choice would be to go for images of the inferno, or the eternal torture of the condemned. Although I like those magnificent scenes of hell found in Bosch’s awe-inspiring works, I’m not a fan of the doctrine of hellfire and damnation, being an out and out heretic as far as that goes. I think death is neither  need not be a terrifying event, nor a change that catapults us to hell or heaven, but a change of consciousness, so if I’m going to stay true to my beliefs in this painting I will need to consider the nature of death as a transition to be taken, simply as a movement 0f the energy of being from this incarnation to the next, in whatever form it takes. The world around the character should reflect this.

I’ve found little time to paint today, but did get the hands laid down, establishing my bony friend as the rock star death. I will get more work done this weekend, after I’ve learned how to fix my car brakes. 

I’ve moved the painting to the other side of the studio because in order to paint the hands, which are about ten feet from the ground now that the painting is on the big easel, I’ve got to use my rolling platform, which makes it completely impossible to step back from the painting to see how the work looks. By going to the other side of the room I can simply look back over my shoulder into the mirror, which is splendid.

I had a spare hour to get into the lab with John and filter the results of the month long distillation of the oak leaves for the heart of Glendale in the tree. It turned out to have a quite musty scent, once I could get past the strong alcohol smell. We set it up to filter, then turned our attention to the distilled sage brush from the desert outside Las Vegas, which has been waiting for attention for a long time. To separate the essential oil of the sage from the alcohol in which it was refluxed we ran it through this splendid machine with the help of two of John’s students – my thanks to Lindsay Lawrence and Jen Norman!

I’ve been stewing on the question of the painting between the angels of birth and death. In the tarot the Fool is the initiate on the journey of self discovery – he’s the allegorical embodiment of the experience of life. 

The third painting almost has to be of a fool on a journey.

I worked late and finished up Death’s chest and outlined the other wing. He’s going nicely.

This afternoon I’ve been shooting photos for the angel of life, which has gone very well indeed, even better than I had hoped. My model was fantastic, photographs very well, and nailed the pose perfectly. Awesome! I might even make a start on the painting sooner than I had originally thought. I still need to take lots of baby pictures to put at her feet.

Although the symbolism of a woman as the bringer of life is absolutely self evident, why do I think of the Angel of Death as male? I suppose it’s simply a perception of duality, that we assume the opposition of the angel of life and death, therefore they must be male and female.

But if we think of the angels of life / female and death / male as a duality, what would be the hermaphroditic one thing that enfolds them both? If they are the allegorical bookend markers of life at its beginning and end, the experience of living – being – is what connects and enfolds the two. 

Perhaps the duality of the two angels for the paintings really should be birth and death, with life as the connection between the two, so I need to rename the angel of life as the angel of birth.

So this leads to another question: if there was to be a third allegorical painting that connected the two by expressing the state of being, what would it be?

I’ve moved the black panel onto the big easel, because now it has the canvas over it and a couple of coats of gesso on its surface (that’s half a gallon of base) it weighs just a bit too much for me to move easily.

I started painting the figure of the angel, first dividing the panel into a grid of one foot squares, then dividing the central area into 6″ squares, especially interested in solving the rib cage with the intricate layers that need to be separated from each other. Having done this twice now I think I see how there might be a method for rendering the ribs more easily if you paint the spine first, then only do the front ribs, then let it dry before working on the back ribs. It really is tricky to separate the layers out in your mind. Maybe I’ll try it on the other half of the chest.

The first wing is only outlined at present because I want to figure out what the best way to get that soft feeling of feathers into the paint. I like the angel of death having some gentle qualities to it.

Dru Pagliassotti reminded me that the psychedelic old space rock band Hawkwind did a song with the lyric “We’re angels of life, we’re angels of death…” (and that’s pretty much the only lyric in the entire song as far as I can remember). I’ll have to play them while I’m working to get into the metal spirit of the thing. 

I’m really enjoying this. I know my friend Steve Mahr will too!