Process

Posted on March 19, 2008 by pearce

Today I achieved almost nothing that one might consider creative.

My son and I went to Simi Valley to pick up a bag full of water bottles for the installation, pausing to take pictures of the oak tree, which I will post tomorrow. (That was the sole directly creative part of the day) then on to the University to plan the schedule of classes for next year.

While we were there I gave Joe, our excellent printer, my PhD dissertation on a zip drive so that it could be printed for the University of Plymouth library. It’s the last step of the amazing journey to complete the doctorate. Five years! Ultimately I’ll split the text into two and make a pair of books to accompany my exhibits.

I spoke to Eric on the phone about the location of the labyrinth. I must contact the stonemason’s place and ask if he’ll do the same promotional deal with us. He was really kind last year.

If there’s a lesson to be learned here it’s that all creative practice requires process that may not be romantic or exciting, but is absolutely necessary for the production of art. 

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Numbers by Painting V

Posted on March 18, 2008 by pearce

Here are the photos that I should have posted yesterday. All in process, nothing completed.

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Two, Five and One in their present condition. 

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Here’s a closer shot of Two. You can see the stippled surface where the rag breaks up the surface of the paint.

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Here’s a shot showing the surface of Five. The semi-transparent white allows a little of the brown undercoat to show through. The Ultramarine blue over the brown becomes a lovely, almost black surface. Here’s the shot I posted of the earlier stage for comparison:

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This is the drawing for Three. The Yin Yang really exemplifies the trinity in Pythagorean numbers, as the monad separates into the dyad, instantly creating the tension of relationship, the triad. Because the symbol is so over-used I’m going for an interpretation of three as the perfect three dimensional cross, as Guenon described it, with each direction up, down, side, side, forward and backward. It suggests that the centre of the universe is everywhere. 

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Numbers by Painting IV

Posted on March 17, 2008 by pearce

I laid on a coat of Ultramarine blue over the brown surface of the number five piece, and used some zinc white mixed with a little payne’s grey to make a semi-transparent blue-grey to glaze over the number two. I pulled the glaze using a clean rag so it has a translucent  patchiness over the white under painting. Newspaper can be good for this too, but it’s quite extreme, leaving saturated and completely removed areas against each other. Using a rag laid flat on the wet canvas then lifted off carefully can remove too much, and require repetition to get it right, but it’s great when it works out properly.

I love to break up the paint surface with a rag, it adds a randomness to the texture that works very effectively when defined later.

The next Neolithic painting (I’m calling it “Storm” for now because the small figure in the background with arms akimbo is brewing a storm) is on the easel staring at me and picking a fight. This is the third time I’ve started painting a falling figure and painted it out. The first one was pretty good too. The model for it was the actor David White, who was a very nice fellow. 

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Earth Day bottles IV

Posted on March 17, 2008 by pearce

Today was the first day of Spring break, so what better way of spending it than preparing hundreds of bottles for the Earth Day installation project?

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CLU students Megan and Sheena peel labels from the bottles. I don’t want to show the manufacturers’ names, and I think the bottles will look better if they are more transparent. When the sunlight hits them they look good. Although the bottles are ubiquitous there’s a nice diversity of form among the different varieties, so I think they’ll look great in the tree. I’m becoming a little concerned that there won’t be enough of a mass of bottles to really make the plane of the bottoms of the bottles really consistent. When we start hanging them we’ll see how it goes.

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Elizabeth counts the bottles, Ethan peels labels. 

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Izzy helps to bag the bottles. Nick continues to get the labels off. 

We have 657 bottles so far! 

All the children are scouts. Scouts Rock!

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Excellent news.

Posted on March 15, 2008 by pearce

I just received an email from the Brand Library Art Gallery, which is Glendale’s biggest and best exhibit space, confirming that I will participate in a show there in 2009. I don’t know who I’ll be grouped with, but the curators said that they had another painter who was very interested in alchemy, so my hope is that we get to do an alchemy show together. The gallery is pretty big. Good news! I’ll post a page of coming events, because things are getting busy.

Dates to be confirmed.  

Posted in Announcements, Exhibits | 2 Comments

Earth Day bottles III

Posted on March 14, 2008 by pearce

Bottle collection is going well. Monday we’ll start preparing these for use in the installation and to see how many we have. I want to remove the labels, put the ash and gravel in the bottles, then tie string around the neck of each so that they are completely prepared for hanging to the tree at the Simi Valley Town Centre. When we get to Simi, all we have to do is set a horizontal line and suspend the bottles. I anticipate three days of hanging bottles to get it right.

Here’s the pile in the gallery:

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A labyrinth for Scandinavian Festival 2008

Posted on March 13, 2008 by pearce

I bumped into Eric Berg this morning while walking to the studio. He’s one of the organizers of the Scandinavian Festival taking place here at the University April 19th and 20th. To my delight he asked if I’d like to make another labyrinth for the festival this year, this time in the park next to the stream. This is a beautiful location for the path to be laid out, so I jumped at the chance. (There are pictures of last year’s path here.)

The main path will be in stone if I can persuade our local stone mason to lend me the rocks again, but I wonder if I can get lots of helium balloons and tie them to the stones and fulfill the elements idea I mentioned in an earlier post. Eric and I were both excited at the chance to put on an evening candlelit pathway event after the festival closes down for the night, imagine five hundred tea lights glowing in the pattern of the labyrinth. 

Because of the Earth Day installation opening on the same day as the festival it looks as though I’m going to be extremely busy in early April. (Here’s the schedule) Right now I think the labyrinth will have to be installed in the first week of the month and dismantled directly after the Festival is over.

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En Grisaille and Velatura

Posted on March 7, 2008 by pearce

Some words are delicious, and beg repetition. Two words from painting have been on my tongue repeatedly this week: “en grisaille” and “velatura”. They’re lovely rich words, made even richer when you learn what importance they had to many old masters painters.

I took a drive with some of my painting students down the 101 to the Getty yesterday morning to visit the collection. At the museum we have the good fortune to have an early painting by Rubens – “The Entombment of Christ”. Although it’s by no means one of his best works, being a square canvas with a rather clumsy composition in comparison to the the master’s fluid later works, it is an absolutely excellent teaching tool. Here’s a detail:

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What’s wonderful about it from my point of view, teaching figurative painting, is that in this work Rubens let the body of Christ remain grey, to give the appearance of death; this means that you can see exactly how a really great painter used a grey “en grisaille” layer to build the underlying rendering, then adding a warm skin coloured “velatura” layer over it to bring in the flesh tones. 

Nearby, one of my favourite paintings in the Getty collection: Sweerts’ painting “Head of a Woman”. It’s a delicious small piece of work featuring a lovely white headscarf wrapped about the hair of a woman who seems to be lacking her teeth.

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The work is rendered in exactly the same way as the Rubens, with a similar grey under-painting, then a quite pink veltura flesh layer, with highlights of vermilion and iron oxide worked into the lips and shadows of the head. You can still see the grey showing through the pink quite clearly.

Across the hall a wonderful painting by the Caravaggisti Valentin of Boulogne, who used a similar technique to paint his “Christ Drawing”, again with an en grisaille and velatura technique, although here he warmed the shadows with a burnt umber to get the characteristic warm shadows of a follower of the great “M”. 

Here’s a painting in the same gallery by the wonderful artist Artemisia Gentileschi.   

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Look for her en grisaille layer, still visible beneath the pink of the velatura in the face and neck, and in the second image in this detail of the hand.

These are appropriately rich words for a rich technique. 

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Pete Patterson

Posted on March 4, 2008 by pearce

I heard from my parents in England that our old neighbour Pete had passed on. When I was a boy he took me hunting with him so often that he became an indelible part of my childhood memories. I’ll always remember clinging on for dear life to a piece of ply-wood chained to the back of his land-rover as it bounced across the grass up at the Iron Age hill fort, Barbary Castle. He didn’t take us kids up there to do that again after Jill Morton, the Swan pub landlord’s daughter fell off the ply-wood and broke her arm.

I’ll always remember the times he took me beating the bushes for pheasants, or working the trap for the clays. I made great pocket money from the shooters for that work. I loved it!

He’d always carry his side by side 12 gauge opened but loaded under his arm, and was incredibly fast to raise and shoot when he saw some game. We’d walk the fields alongside the hedgerows with his three dogs Sally, Jenny (the two Jack Russells) and Sue (a black Labrador), working the bushes to flush out unfortunate rabbits, Pete with his tweed hat on and wearing a green jacket. After we’d been shooting we’d go off to the pub for a quick half of cider and back home. Then he would clean the guns, gut the rabbits, and he would play his harmonica. 

Pete was a classic Wiltshire countryman with an accent as broad as a barn. He knew the countryside in the dark, knew were to find the pheasants, when they nested, where the rabbits needed to be caught. He didn’t talk much, but he was a wonderful man, I’ll miss him. We were lucky to have him. I learned to love the Wiltshire countryside because of him.

God’s got him now, and I imagine he’s wandering the fields of heaven with his dogs, chasing rabbits out of the hedgerows. That’s what a piece of heaven looks like to me, walking with Pete and talking about the countryside and the animals.

 

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Receptions at High Studio

Posted on March 3, 2008 by pearce

The exhibit at the High Studio just closed, so we’re getting ready for the next show. Here are a few of the pieces from the closing reception.

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Michael Angelos

 

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Frank Looks Down and New Blue Lynn 

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