Michael Pearce

It’s so good to get a full day in the studio! Having completed the warm and cool work, done the white highlights and fixed the blue ribcage by turning it brown inside, I’ve turned to getting the pebbles in the low foreground done. Already I’m getting a strong sense of the way that the skulls and stones fill the canvas completely, giving it a density of detail that at the beginning I hoped would feel overwhelming. It’s working!

The stones need a couple of layers of colour and certainly some grey to make them work with the sky when it goes dark, then some highlighting to make the forward left side appear to be lit.

I’ll have to continue tomorrow, because I’m over-tired, which makes me sloppy.

Adding Raw Sienna as a warm colour on the left sides of the skulls and a Cobalt blue on the right side in the deep shadows has unified the rendering of the skulls and made things seem more three dimensional. In the first photo you can see the dark blue going into the darkest areas of the shadows, like eye sockets and in the spaces between the crania. In the second I’ve taken most of the blue off with a rag, leaving a thin glaze to make these shadows vibrate a little cooler against the warmth of the Raw Sienna.

After completing the warm and cool work I added Ceramic White highlights on the left front side of the skulls, where the brightest reflected light should be. I spent a good bit of time looking at the painting to figure out how the work would be effected by turning the sky quite a lot darker. I want the head of the angel to pop out more because it feels a touch lost in competition with the density of skulls against it in the lower half of the painting, so if the sky turns black around it the head of the angel will be much stronger.

It was a good day in the studio. Cameron and Joe  helped to get everything straight, and I feel very comfortable working in the new space.

Happy Birthday America!

My exile from the studio while the wall was built is over. Although the floor is filthy, theres no door, and the lights aren’t working quite properly, it’s functional enough to get back to painting, so I’ve been working with Ceramic white to drop the higher skulls back toward the distance – there’s a nice mistiness that’s produced when I wipe most of the paint off with a rag that works very well. The Ceramic white is great as a substitute for Zinc in this kind of application, but I also like it for it’s almost blue-ish brightness when it’s used more densely, as I did to brighten up the bones of the skeleton and to fix some of the skulls that I’m not entirely happy with. I’ll repaint the skulls under the Angel with a little Van Dyke brown and emphasize the shadows in the foreground so that the closest skulls pop forward a bit more. Finally, I’ve used the white beneath the skulls where you can see the first layer of what will eventually become a spread of pebbles with weeds forcing their way through. I think I’ll take advantage of an old studio painters trick, putting some bright red flowers in front of the white skulls so they really jump. It might be too much, but I think it would be fun to try it. Poppies? They’re the classic symbol of sleep and forgetfulness.

It’s strange to be in the studio in its new form, but I can see that it’s going to be really terrific to work in when things get organized and arranged properly.

Oh, a correction to the last entry about sketching the next paintings – I meant to say the Empress when I said I was drawing the Priestess. Sorry for the mix-up. I’ve taken the liberty of altering the previous post.

With that patch of unworked white steadily diminishing, I’m getting so close to finishing the first layer of the skulls that it’s almost painful. In answer to Gary’s comment on the previous post (thanks for that), this has been an exercise in patience and stamina, with curiously little emotional impact from the work. You might think that repeatedly painting skulls would turn me into a melancholy fellow, but I’ve not thought of death to any greater degree than usual while doing this. I find the idea of my own death challenging, but not particularly terrifying – it affects my work intensely because I’m extremely aware that my time is limited by the fact that one day I will certainly perish, which means that I probably have time to make a hundred and some large paintings before I “shuffle off this mortal coil”. Since a particularly bad car crash in the late nineties I’ve been profoundly conscious of my mortality and this inspires me to be more productive, so the image of the angel of death isn’t depressing to me, in fact I find it quite inspiring, as a spur to get on with the wonderful experience of living and “to make best use of the talents wherewith God has blessed me”, both as a teacher and as an artist.

I’m very excited that tomorrow I should be able to complete these skulls in their first layer. I’ll soon be able to move onto finishing up the skeleton and adding warm and cool to the skulls, followed by highlights of white and a darker sky.

Adding skulls to the left side has really made a big difference to the feel of the painting. Now I’m getting a very strong sense of scale, with the skulls reaching from side to side around the angel, falling away from him and around him beyond the boundaries of the canvas edges. I’m seriously considering darkening the upper sky so that there’s more balance of light and dark in the composition, making the image more dramatic. I’ll post a picture of the whole when I’ve made it to the horizon.

It was difficult to start work today, but once I got some sense of how much impact the completion of the left side will have on the piece I started feeling a lot more energetic. Should be done with this layer pretty soon. Taking care of administrative work took up a lot of time, but should pay off in the long run.