Michael Pearce

I’ve returned from the mountains, where I enjoyed a little camping beneath forest pines with some good friends. There’s something incredibly refreshing about sleeping outside amongst trees. Much of the forest was burnt to a crisp a couple of years ago and simply hasn’t recovered. There are miles of mountains covered with blackened tree trunks showing no sign of life. It will take many years for these pines to return, but there’s new grass showing, and wild flowers are returning, so the natural cycle seems to be working toward regeneration.

In the studio, armed with a one inch beat-up soft round brush that I’ve had for years, I’ve been adding Ivory Black to the shadows, emphasizing the dark, light, dark composition of the painting, with that strong white upward thrust of the skeleton cutting through the layers. The stones got a glaze of black, disciplined with a soft rag to pull back the lights, while the foreground skulls got a bit more care, with deeper shadows around he sides of the crania and in the darker pockets of the eye sockets, nasal cavity and mouth.

I’ve ordered a package of peacock feathers for the angel to wear around his neck, so I’ll have to figure out how this will affect the composition before getting into painting it. The feathers have to come from China, so there’s going to be a bit of a delay until they get here, so I plan to work on Amelia a little while waiting for them. Cameron and Joe brought her over to the studio this morning for me.

Raw sienna makes a huge difference to the appearance of the work, making the surface of the skull and the shadows drop back and giving them some age. I’m particularly pleased with the appearance of the skull, although I think it could use a little more correction and observation to the interior surfaces of the mouth; nevertheless the repositioning of the teeth and this shadow work has made a big difference.
I’ve reworked the bones of the spine, mostly using white to bring back the light, with a little redefinition of the dark shadows. Presently the backbone is popping too far forward, so I’ll darken it in the next layer to correct this, while adding the yellowish tint of the Raw Sienna. The pelvis got the same treatment, making the slight turn to our left more apparent.

Continuing with the work on the skull to improve the rendering has resulted in a much wider mouth and an increasingly savage appearance. I still need to work on the mouth to improve it, having moved his upper teeth higher and enlarging the lower set a little, but the inside of the mouth is proving to be too bright, and is distracting from the teeth, which I think should be more important. I can’t darken it yet, because the white paint I used to correct the teeth has to dry properly before I can glaze over it to drop it back. I’m finding it enjoyable to compare the earlier version with this one.

I redefined the neck vertebrae and got into the ribs and sternum, using a Van Dyke Brown to clean up lost edges and darken some of the shadows that had become excessively grey following repeated fixings and re-workings. Once the other hand is done I’ll re-work the spine.

I’ve moved across the painting to work on the skull of the angel, which really needs some help. I’ll have to rework the bottom of it because the upper jaw’s teeth are too low and irritating me beyond belief, so I’ll bring them up toward the nose a little, correcting the error and widening the opening of the mouth. Inside the mouth is pretty vague right now, so I’ll have to set up the skeleton for reference again, this time keeping the mandible in place with a line from below, not inside. I fixed the placement of the eye sockets and re-rendered the right hand one to a satisfactory state, while the left one still needs some work.  Generally speaking the work looks like it’s going to be effective, brightening the bone and making the skull jump forward from the sky. The paint is getting thicker and richer, with some nice vibrations appearing between the different layers of subtle colour changes.

The hands got coated in that black glaze that I used on the sky to darken it, so I’ve got to rework them with a layer of white. Once the white is complete I’ll get into a re-rendering with Van Dyke brown, then follow the same method I’ve used on all the other bones, finding warms and cools with the Raw Sienna and Cobalt Blue. Not enough time to get anything substantial done, running to the Getty again today to see those icons again, so I’m hoping to get a bit more done now I’m back in the studio.

At the Getty I saw that lovely gilded panel with the floral pattern work on the clothing that I liked so much – it’s still the highlight of the icon collection for me.

Ribs don’t join the sternum as bone, there’s a cartilage bridge that connect them. I’ve not seen a recently exhumed skeleton, so I’m not entirely sure what this would look like, and my only real medical skeleton has some rather poorly done filler material that I’m sure is not at all realistic. My fake plastic skeletons are not much more helpful because although they’re very good reproductions of the physical structure of the bones, they may not be entirely authentic. I found this New York Times article on a fantastic medical atlas – fascinating, but the bodies were embalmed, so again I’m left uncertain of the true colour of the bones and cartilage.

I went to the Bodies exhibit in Las Vegas a year and a half ago, which was wonderful as an insight into the way the human body is arranged. If those colours are true, then the yellow cartilage beside the sternum should be about right with this Raw Sienna glaze, although the bones generally have a more yellowish cast, too.

My colleague Brian, who has been in and out of the studio recently told me to remember that I’m painting a walking skeleton with giant wings and not to worry about it! Good advice.

I’ve darkened the deeper shadows of the wings so they recede more, and popped in some drop shadow behind the skeleton against the feathers. I also ran a little black around the edges of the wings, into the angel’s surroundings so they drop back a little, in contrast to the skeleton, which I want to come forward in the image. Soft edges recede, hard edges come forward.

I finished up the first layer of the pebbles, which need more work to make them effective, then got into the most radical change the painting has seen since I decided to put the sea of skulls into the landscape. The sky took a layer of black, wiped off with rags to reveal the colours of the clouds, making it far more oppressive and allowing the head of the angel to pop out from the painting much more than it did before. I’ll need to repaint the hands again (this is why I didn’t bother painting them in the first place, if you remember December) once this layer is dry.

I’m taking a break for a little dinner, then I’ll get on with darkening the shadows of the inside of the wings a bit more and perhaps working on the landscape of skulls a little if I feel that they need to get darker to balance the image.