+ The Gilded Raven Blog and Gallery +

We had a very busy day in the studio. Ethan and Joseph were occupied with the second coat of gesso on the big Virtues canvas, then Joe got into stretching the third of the eight foot square canvas that Cyn McCurry sent from Texas onto its panel, ready for a wash of distilled water prior to preparing the surface with a coat or two of gesso so I can draw the empress and her attendants onto the new surface.

While the lads worked hard at preparing the surfaces for painting I added more peacock feathers to the Angel of Death, getting them most of the way up the right wing. I’ll add colour to them tomorrow and figure out what needs to be done to the top of the wings, then get to work on the empress drawing if the gesso dries fast enough to take the graphite.

I scanned images from Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens, a well known alchemical emblem book. Emblem books were incredibly popular bestsellers in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, filled with allegorical pictures and their accompanying epigrams, generally speaking rooted in mystical Christianity and Neo-Platonism. I love these books! They’re inspiring, mysterious and fulfilling, and profoundly supportive of the desire of man to understand the mind of God, while written and illustrated in a style that is unapologetically intelligent, requiring the reader to be thoughtful and patient as the sometimes obscure messages of the emblems is revealed by research and exploration. I emulate them in my paintings, hoping to equal their spiritual depth and to follow their guidance toward a better understanding of the universe.

More peacock feathers have emerged on the wings, after trying out a green glaze with a little Iron Oxide Red and some Cobalt Blue to create the eyes. I’m going to try a little white highlighting, then a glaze of Ultra Blue to finish them off. On the left there’s another batch of the feathers based out in white and Van Dyke Brown which will get their colour tomorrow.

I’ve glazed the leaves with Ceramic White to unify them with the background. Next I’ll re-establish the edges of the leaves with a touch of Raw Umber. I want to try this out as my first colour for the first layer of my figures when we start work on the big canvas, because I’ve been admiring the work of Burne-Jones, who appears to have used it for establishing all his figures, mixing it with white for highlights. He was a superb Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painter who was a great friend of William Morris, designing the beautiful Kelmscott Chaucer with him, a book I’ve always loved, which is now worth a quarter of a million dollars. I was able to admire two copies of it at a book fair in London in May and was overwhelmed by the beauty of its elegant type and border work.

Joseph has continued with gessoing the big canvas, almost reaching half way across. I’d better get to work designing the painting!