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I added a pool of blood to the ground around the head. Right now it’s too bright, and will need to get a layer to moderate the intensity of colour.

I took stone from the canyon and ground it to powder. The sage is broken to small pieces and placed into my blender, reduced to fragments. Tomorrow I will macerate the two in a solvent and set up a reflux tower to pull the essence from them.

The sword is coming along, based on a fabulous samurai sword loaned to me by our lovely costume designer, Lolita Ball, who is simply delightful. The alchemical Queen Amelia looks dramatic and intentional now, having acted to behead the king, now she has to transform herself in order to join the alchemical king in the process of conjunctio, when the two become one alloy. the beheaded element transforms into the pure essence, which I will soon add to the painting as a pure white flame, placed at 1:1.62 on the canvas.

I rendered the head (a self portrait) en grisaille, ready for development when this first layer has dried. Fast and thick, this work will look good as I build the layers of colour over it. 

I visited Dr. John Tannaci in his laboratory at the University because he asked me if I’d like to learn more about distillation. His class has been using distillation to extract the essential oils of nutmeg for a class project so this presented a perfect opportunity to see the techniques of alchemy in action. The cooling system was used first to extract the essence of the nutmeg in a solvent with a low boiling point, about fifty five degrees, then set up for distillation. The low boiling point of the solvent meant that it all came over to the collection flask first, leaving behind the extraction, which boils at a higher temperature, so it simply doesn’t change as the solvent bubbles away.

A nice insight into the alchemical nature of the tarot card “the Tower” came when a bung failed during the distillation process, completely ruining the experiment and meaning that the unfortunate victims of the failure had to completely re-do the work from scratch.

I have been thinking ahead wondering what comes next in the painting. If Amelia is the elemental representative of the purified air, coming to the earth to be combined with it in the alchemical conjunction, then she will need to bring heat for the elements to be combined. In renaissance alchemical symbolism fire is often symbolized by the sword, so I decided to give her a sword in the hand she holds behind her back. I also like the concealment of the weapon, because it gives Amelia a strength that she didn’t so overtly present before. She’s a strong woman; now she has the tools to complement her strength and implement her will.

Here’s a nice alchemical text about a symbolic sword found on Adam McLean’s fabulously informative website: Flammel’s Hieroglyphics. His Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures which he caused to bee painted upon an Arch in St. Innocents Church-yard, in Paris. London, 1624. In chapter five we find an allegorical figure of a man with a sword standing beside a kneeling figure. In Flamel’s alchemical text the sword is about to be used to decapitate the man, purifying him and releasing the purest whiteness.

I’m going to write Tolle nigredinem - “take away from me my blackness” (quoted from Flamel’s text) on a ribbon attached to the sword. I’m going to need to add a decapitated head at Amelia’s feet showing that she is reaching for the light only after having used the sword to pass the alchemical man through the nigredo to the pure element.

I worked for a hour on improving her hair, adding some white and laying in some raw sienna, that sandy brown with a yellowish-green quality. I’m pretty happy with what I’m getting. On her jacket lapel I painted a couple of button badges, one a peace symbol, the other a yin yang (It’s a big image so you’ll see the details if you click on it). On a superficial level these are very personal to me, being pins that I wore when I was a teenager at school in England, very interested in the CND (campaign for nuclear disarmament) and wondering at the courage of activists who were prepared to go up against the government in defense of their principles. I remember being impressed by the activities of the suffragettes, Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement, the Weathermen and the Black Panthers, Nelson Mandela’s A.N.C., the Communist revolution, and almost any fight in which the underdog prevailed. Nowadays I’m less interested in activism, except for an occasional foray into environmentalism, like the alchemy tree, and hope to inspire spiritual change more than anything else. On a deeper level, the yin yang represents the trinity, emphasizing Amelia’s role as divine messenger, and the peace symbol suggests the goal of her action, bringing peace to the alchemical man who has been beheaded, but transformed by her action.

Here’s the base layer of the shadows on Justice’s robe. I love the play between the blue and the white, very pleasant, but I’m going to have to warm up the shadows on the left side so the figure gets some depth to it. I’ll lay down another layer of white to soften the work when this layer is dry. All the usual problems of Titanium white, beading the glaze and doubtless causing cracking as it dries. I like the transparency and practicality of the Zinc much better.

I’m getting a lot of work done today! 

I re-rendered Amelia’s feet because they were so completely off. This is much better, they’re feet that someone could actually stand on now. I separated the legs a touch, too, and added some white to the ground around the new feet. I’ll need to rework the rocks upon which she stands later.

I’m curious about my role producing fine art objects, when I’m simultaneously reducing my need for material. I’m beginning to grasp the value of making very simple changes - the movement of one rock from the ground to a new position upon another rock, for example. Isn’t a simple act like that is much of a creative decision as any other change we make to the world? The butterfly flaps its wings in Tibet and a hurricane starts in Cuba. Ohhhhm…

Another layer of zinc white over the shadow work in the wings,  dropping the dark areas back into the white and giving a softer quality to the surface of the feathers.

I put the stream of water between the bottles in, which was tricky, because I wanted to get this umbilical twisting to the fluid as it pours impossibly from one bottle to the other. I’m pretty satisfied with the result. While I was at it with the white I scraped some highlights into the jacket, which had been pretty flat. I’ll put a glaze of iron oxide - burnt sienna - over it when it has dried, which will bring it back to the orange / brown I love. 

I worked on defining the features of the face first, using the Prussian blue to draw edges and shadows around the eyes, nose and mouth. Having defined the features I added some pinks and reds around the mouth in particular, but also a few touches around the nostrils and the corners of the eyes, to give them some life. I used some zinc white with a touch of pink to add some highlights into the skin, and cleaned up the eyes and teeth. To unify the painting I put a few touches of the same colours onto highlight areas of the coat, for instance the left shoulder, which in truth are so subtle as to be almost invisible, but I think they’re really important, because they imitate the natural phenomenon of reflected light, which will put discrete touches of colour onto surfaces that are close to each other.

These fires are too frequent and too intense. In alchemy the nigredo is the process of destroying the impurities of the material by burning it, reducing it to its essential element before re-combining it with another element. I’m finding a microcosmic parallel between the fires and the city and the process of this divorce: I truly feel as if I am being cleansed of non-essential material and finding the inner core of my self, the elemental centre. I’m discovering that material doesn’t matter, and the things that I really want to keep are few: my books, clothes and my tools for making things. Spiritually I have found that reducing the material needs of life has been liberating, and reminds me of coming to the United States eighteen years ago, with only a backpack and a thousand dollars. It was scary but liberating then, too.

Obviously my children come before any of this stuff, which fades to grey in comparison to the light in which I hold them.

The air smells of smoke. A breath of wind moves leaves.

In the studio: total peace. Amelia is waiting for her feet to be attended to, and there’s a field of flowers waiting to bloom. Terry said she plans to come over to work on her canvases today, so I’m looking forward to her company. She’s an excellent painter.

 I had a really good time painting this layer, really in the flow of painting. I added some shadows to the leg and put a layer of blue in to give the colour some depth. I will go over it again with another layer of cobalt blue later that will grey it down a little, because it’s a touch too bright right now. Using the different blues gives the area a nice rich quality that is quite true to what actually goes on with a colour, with its varieties of shade and light, warms and cools. I’ll add in some subtle warm tones to counter the cool blue. I have to unify the head and the neck more effectively, and work on the hair. I added some subtle shadows to the jacket so that there is a lapel on the left side, giving it some coherence.

I put the first structural layer into the hand, pretty rough at present, but I will smooth things out and define the shape more closely soon.

My ex-wife and kids were evacuated AGAIN last night because of the Sylmar fire which burned through the Northeast side of the mountains near to the house. It’s the month of fires here. On the plus side this means that there’s nothing left to burn, so it’s over for the season. Nothing yet in Thousand Oaks, thankfully.