Michael Pearce

I’ve been working on painting the first and most important of the hands in the Empress painting, working in Van Dyke brown to establish shape and shadows. The value is too dark at present, but will lighten when I introduce a further layer of white and brown to refine the surface, as I did with the faces. I’ve also been filling in gaps with white paint, making sure that the figures are all prepared for more work.

I’m hurting to get that Foundation white. I really want to get the marble established on the left and around the figures so I can get a better sense of the balance of the value in the lower half of the painting. The medium tone of the Burnt Sienna is quite distracting at the moment; in terms of value when everything has a coat of white over it the painting will be much closer to its ultimate destination.

I’ve spent my studio time painting skin, walls and dresses white. Having woken up early and excited about painting the architecture in the painting I managed to get to the studio by eight o’clock, getting directly into the work (after a nice cup of tea). First, solidifying the low marble walls of the circular structure the girls have found themselves in, which is beginning to make sense now that we can see some of it more clearly. I really enjoyed the mass created by the substantial nature of the white over the orange sealer. The line work is simply Maimeri Van Dyke Brown blended into the white to create the cracks between the slabs. Once I have all the walls painted I’ll get into glazing and staining them, making them feel more realistic than these rather sterile slabs.

I’d like to have been able to show more completed walls, but a minor disaster struck this morning – I ran out of Michael Harding’s fabulously dense Foundation White, which meant that I’ve had to stop work on the base coat of the marble until more can be flown in from the far reaches of the continent in a few days – somewhere on the East coast.

Reflecting upon the desperation which I felt when I realized that I had no more of this fabulous white, I’m a little disturbed by my relationship to certain pigments and brands of paint, which sometimes dangerously resembles being a crack addict.

I continued painting by moving over to the dresses and the skin of the two girls on the left, using more of Michael Harding’s paint, this time a Cremnitz White, a far more transparent pigment that allows more of the warmth of the Iron Oxide sealer coat to glow through it.

I’ve been figuring out the shapes of the architecture within which the girls stand; a circular setting made of marble sunk into the ground, surrounded by cherry trees in the raised planters. Getting the curves of the stone was interesting work, with multiple vanishing points to complicate things and weird foreground and background problems to solve. I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got at this point, but I want to sleep on it, then see how it looks tomorrow before I start painting it. It doesn’t make good photographs as it is, so I’ve not posted any here, but when I commit to the shapes I’ll paint this structural work in whites before marbling it all, then show how it looks. I’ve made the structure reminiscent of a labyrinth, suggesting that the girls have found their way to the centre.

I’ve used the golden section as the horizon line for a strip of ocean above the back wall, echoing those lovely compositions by Alma-Tadema with a rich blue sky filling the top half of the composition, while the lower half is white. Following the white theme in the bottom half the girls are going to wear white dresses with touches of colour. In front of the blue sky I’m planning to paint lots of pink cherry blossom, in complete contrast to the Angel of Death, no?

Using white dragged into wet Raw Umber to create lines and folds in the fluid surface, I worked to produce hair for three of the girls. It’s not all completed, but it’s going well and I’m pleased with the image as it stands. I’ve also reworked the faces of the two girls on the right side, who look a lot better for a little attention. I moved the eye of the fourth girl from the left down her face almost an inch, having placed it far too high, then smoothed her forehead back a little and reworked her mouth, making her a little more girlish. The girl on the left isn’t particularly graceful yet, so I plan to work on smoothing her features and perhaps lengthening her face a little.

I’ve begun to extend the painting from the heads toward the bodies, where I’m looking at painting lots of folds and decoration. I’d like to get the flesh completed en grisaille before I get into it. This might turn out to be the first painting I’ve ever done entirely en grisaille; I often move further ahead with different areas, returning to the grey layers here and there to add features to the work. In this case I want to be sure to keep the value of the work consistently lighter than usual, so I think I’ll exercise some restraint before working on colour.

I spent a long time working on getting the faces right, improving value work and re-rendering errors of proportion. I didn’t get to the head on the extreme right, but the others went fairly smoothly until I started getting tired and things began to get a bit frayed around the edges. I try to pay attention to that moment when my body crosses a line of physical tiredness that may not be shared by my mind, because the work inevitably suffers when I try to force it too much.

I’m enjoying painting in Raw Umber, which really lends itself to monotone work quite nicely. I’m looking forward to getting the velatura layer over this one. I’m trying to keep my value higher than I usually would, in my efforts to make my work lighter and more subtle.