Michael Pearce

At last the vines extend from their source to their goal.

After worrying about getting the hand right I realized that this was an unnecessary pre-occupation because just like her right hand, her left directs the vines toward the Emperor, disguising much of it behind the foliage. I spent a fruitful day in the studio working on basing the leaves and flowers in Foundation White, preparing for rendering the detail in browns. I’m enjoying the flow of the vines as they not only twist around the legs of the chair, but also twist around themselves to create an almost vortex-like feeling. I’ll take some time away from the painting this evening to see it with a fresh eye tomorrow and add more body to what I already have here in order to emphasize this movement. I let a few tendrils run loose to climb toward the Emperor’s stick, adding a little more sensation of growth and directed movement, but we won’t see this particularly clearly for a while – there’s still a lot of work to be done before I can finish up with details.

I think I probably write the words “Raw Umber” more than any others on this blog, perhaps in close competition with “Foundation White” because I use so much of this lovely, versatile brown and rich, solid white in my work these days. Thank you so much to M. Graham for the Raw Umber and to Michael Harding for the White.

Today I’m working on the landscape, building trees on the horizon line with rags and a quarter of an inch egbert (a slightly long filbert). I don’t recall painting grass before, except that little bit in the foreground of the Traveler, and I spent a little time thinking about how best to lay down the deep layers of long grass and making it recede toward the background. I’m heading more towards an un-mown meadow than the grazed grass I was thinking of earlier, partly because I want to emphasize fertility and partly because I want to enjoy the challenge of painting a convincing swath of long grass with all the complexities of stems and leaves growing over each other.

After the Cobalt Blue was thoroughly dry and I got over a nasty but mercifully short little flu virus that beat me up this weekend, I was able to pounce the sky with a coat of Foundation white, dropping the excessive brightness of the blue back, softening the edges of the figures and the vines and producing the first layer of colour in the otherwise monochromatic canvas. I imagine this sky getting layers of delicate pinks and yellows to give it more flavour, but this will have to wait for a few days until the white is truly stable.

Doing the sky is a lot of work, taking a great deal of time and lots of shoulder work because of all the pouncing that must be done to get a nice smooth surface that doesn’t show too many marks.

Blue paint going over the previous work, to be wiped away later.

Using the pouncing ball to smooth the paint.

Once the rag is saturated it stops lifting paint and simply softens textures.

I’ve been busy painting a first layer of the sky, first using a brush to paint a layer of the colour over the entire sky, then using an old but clean t-shirt as a pouncing rag, all bunched up into a ball, but without creases in the surface so that as I pounce the paint it leaves a smoothed surface that doesn’t show a texture.

Although I’ve applied the paint over the edges of the work I’ve already done, I know that most of it will be easily wiped away with a separate rag once the pouncing is complete. It’s seriously bright now, so I’ll wait for it to dry thoroughly and add a layer of white over it to soften it. I like it when the background colour overlaps the figures a little bit because it enhances the curve of edges away from the viewer. Hard edges come forward in a painting, soft edges recede.

Although it felt early to be getting colour onto the canvas I didn’t feel comfortable about getting to work on the trees until I had the basic layer of the sky done so that the branches and leaves can be silhouetted against something of substance rather than the grey that’s under this layer of blue.