I’m really enjoying painting the marble wall, which is going to work nicely with the addition of two or three very light transparent glazes of warm Iron Oxide red and a blue to give it some vibration. I need to measure the position of the cracks between the slabs too, so I can line them [...]
This evening I made use of a short hour and a half to get started on the faces in the Empress painting, with good results. I’m pleased to get started with the work – it’s good to get back to painting the figure again after painting the skulls and bones of the Angel of Death [...]
The base white is down on the lower half of the Virtues painting, beginning the work in earnest. The gesture of the brush marks follows the contour of the wall and the slabs of marble that will be on the ground, while some of the warm orange colour of the sealer coat is allowed to [...]
I’ve been looking for sources for the two paintings, particularly the stonework of the foreground of the Virtues and the fabric of the dresses that will feature in it and the Empress. I’m very interested in Alma-Tadema’s work with marble in many of his paintings – he clearly knew he was onto a good thing, [...]
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope Love and the Maiden (detail). Here’s a detail of a fabulous example of late Victorian painting. She’s fantastic, isn’t she? I found her quite by accident at the Legion of Honor Gallery in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, in the company of a beautiful Bougereau and a lovely Alma-Tadema. There’s an [...]
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England has announced that it is putting together an exhibit of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. This isn’t particularly earth-shattering news in itself, but their plan is to bring the show to San Francisco, which is an enjoyable six hour drive North through vineyards and amazing coastal scenery from my home, [...]
I relined the blue drawing of the figures with graphite, having discovered that the pigment was not particularly strong once I started work with the base coat. The completed figures have been sealed under a wiped out layer of Iron Oxide Red, which means that soon I’ll be able to do some en grisaille work [...]
I continued drawing the Empress, getting the feet onto the canvas, then editing the figures to make them a touch more graceful. Altering figures is a risky business because if you do too much they stop being cohesive and anatomical relationships begin to fail. Although we may not all study the anatomy of the body, [...]
A lovely afternoon with my painting students led to a few hours of concentrated drawing on the Empress canvas, continuing the work from my initial foray and adding the majority of the other figures to the composition. I’ve edited out the globus cruciger from the image for now, but I’m not sure that this will [...]
With the sealed canvas dry and ready for the first painting work to begin Joe, Jason, Devin and Casey started to put down the base en grisaille layer. Because my goal is to have the painting feel filled with the beauty and glory of the sunlight the work is particularly light, with little shadow. What [...]
