Michael Pearce

The Traveler has gained some jeans and a flask at his belt. This first layer is a little bright, so I’ll drop it back a bit later on with some Van Dyke Brown to deepen the shadows. I’ve added highlights to the jacket so that I can re-glaze it with the iron oxide then a touch of Prussian blue to deepen the colour and make it darker, matching the upper part of the coat. I altered the grey spiral to a gold and added some white highlights to the buttons, soon to be glazed with some Cadmium Yellow so the highlights pop up from the Raw Sienna that’s there right now. I’m getting quite excited by the prospect of finishing this piece pretty soon, perhaps I’ll plan a party to reveal it.

The biggest change to the painting resulting from yesterday’s work is that the valley floor has finally become an ocean, ending my vacillation about whether or not this should be land or sea. The water is a little light right now, but will work well with a second layer of green and blue mixed with some grey. I added some raw Sienna and some light grey to the surf line. and mixed some areas of lighter grey to the surface to suggest the movement of the swell.

I think detail can really make a huge difference to a painting, and I thoroughly enjoyed working on building some careful work into the piece yesterday. I carved the staff into a spiral which will be headed by silver and gold at either end. The knife got a celtic knot at the bottom, and I braided the strap, but forgot to take a picture. Because I reshaped the top of the knife handle I left it blank, but will add a knot-work feature on there later. Finally I added a tree to the right side of the landscape, based on a tree beside the ocean in Carmel.

A second visit to the creation of a stone pathway worked out pretty well, resulting in this pebble track leading to the cliff’s edge. I wanted to make sure that the traveler’s journey was clearly to the precipice, not onward along the side – having changed the landscape a week ago fixed the problematic composition but left his intended journey a little unclear. I’ve done similar work with pebbles before, particularly in the Amelia painting, which I really need to bring over to the studio for some more attention now that I know about the creek that’s supposed to be in the foreground. Having painted all those birch trees I’d also like to add leaves on the ground so that we feel more involved in a forest scene.

The stones are all green at present, but I’ll add some Raw Sienna and some other colour to them later to make them come away from the surrounding grass. I like the invitation the pathway offers to people looking at the painting – because it leads off the front edge of the painting it suggests that they could walk into it, joining the traveler in the landscape.

I started adding some detail to the edges of the pathway, where the flowers are simply floating in the air. I’ve found a good way of using a striping brush to create grassy shadows as the beginning stage of putting green stems into the painting.

Darkened the grey of his pants and cleaned up his Kung Fu shoes. Aihua says that travelers wear exactly these kinds of shoe when they go for a long journey in China. Cleaned up the skull and bones beneath the tree with a pale grey, need to add a touch of pale yellow into them to make them appear more like old bone.

I hear that Cody (the student who modeled for me as the traveling man) is really enjoying his role in the making of the painting because everyone who visits the studio recognizes him in it, so I guess he’s hearing all about it from people who know him. Fun.

A very productive day in the studio!

I did a lot of cleanup work this evening, fixing the figure up with some black shoes, deepening the shadows of his bag, clarifying the shadows of the jacket, glazing his over-white shirt with some dirty grey and painting his pants with a layer of grey. (Blues next).

The landscape got a thorough work-over too, with additional shadows between rose leaves and below the man, and a re-emphasis of the trunk of the tree, while a skull and a couple of long bones have made an appearance at its foot. I used some Van Dyke Brown to made the edges of the cliff sharper, while aligning the jagged cuts toward the mountain far off in the distance. I briefly experimented with putting flagstones beneath his feet, but disliked it, so I think I’ll be busy painting grass pretty soon.

My easel is very large and I have always extolled its virtues, but yesterday it suffered a total disaster when one of the pulleys used to pull up the shelf that holds the canvas snapped – made from cheap cast metal, it simply couldn’t take the weight of the painting, which crashed down to the floor, narrowly avoiding falling over onto me as I was painting the early layers of the foliage on the right side. I’ll need to replace the broken pulley and its remaining partner with some much better quality steel pieces. As the shelf fell the weight of the painting broke the strips that held it into the cart that slid up and down behind it, which means that I’ll also have to rebuild the entire shelf’s sled assembly before I am able to use it again. This is a serious problem because I’m working on the bottom of the painting at the moment, so I need to be able to raise and lower it to a decent painting position. Right now the painting is sitting upon a table against the easel, which is not exactly ideal, but at least it makes it possible to work.

Once I’d managed to get the piece back up and in a good position I was able to get some good work done on the landscape and flowers on the right hand side. It’s been all about Iron Oxide to colour the flowers orange, with a little cadmium yellow here and there, while the megaliths that dominated the centre of the piece are completely gone now, so we can see what I expect to be the final shape of the cliffside. A layer of green background leaves is not very clear in the picture here, but looks effective in reality. After a couple more layers of base leaves I expect to paint some grey flower heads so the foreground blossoms pop. I mean to put some pinks over the orange of the flowers on the left, so that they have a nice warm vibration and some depth in the spaces between the petals.

At last I’ve painted over the last of the oxide base coat and the painting is moving into the final phases. I’ve given myself permission to paint fantasy into my work, revisiting my youth when I loved Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings and Michael Moorcock’s Chronicles. Why not? I’ve finally got to the point where I can paint what I want to, so I intend to enjoy myself. So here’s a little trip into unreality, with a precipitous cliffside and impossible flora.

Lots of work to do to complete it, but this is a nice place to be.

I’ll add more flowers into the foreground and bring colour into the white flowerheads that I’ve put into the ground. I think that the acacia needs to bloom with its characteristically abundant yellow flowers.

It’s funny how different areas of a painting demand attention at different times. I pretty much completed the top half of the figure at the beginning of the project, leaving the bottom half until now. There’s no logical reason for this, it just happened that way.