Michael Pearce

I’ve been developing the shadows of the skull and shoulders, defining the shapes of the bones and fixing the more glaring errors. It’s a little slow, but I feel the need to get detail down and make this a rather careful painting, probably for the same reason that I had for getting the reaper right for the tarot card version – my medical family wouldn’t let me get away with it if it doesn’t meet their anatomical standard! The photo looks a little dark here but you can see how the definition is coming to the figure. I’m interested in how the wings will work with the shadowed bones of the skeleton, and I will need to add the sky between the ribs, with a transition to the white feathers somewhere half way down his back.

There’s a pretty big photo behind the thumbnail you see here.

It feels good to get some time in the studio again, it’s been too long – it’s not that I’ve wasted time, because the week since returning from camping has been important for my kids to start feeling at home in the new house. I enjoyed getting up onto the platform and surveying the painting after a while away from it, then making effective changes to it.

I’ve been up in the sierras camping with my son near Lake Isabella, amongst the redwoods and pines, catching trout during the day and hiking up mountains in the early morning to watch the dawn sun emerge over high ridge lines. We slept beneath infinite stars floating in the gentle embrace of the Milky Way, watching the steady journey of satellites tracking between the dark outlines of pines, and  listening to hooting owls hunting sleepy snakes. 

Today I’m back into the studio where I’m teaching my students the pleasure of gold leaf and iconography, and finding my way back into the angel of death. I’ll get back into my daily routine of work more stably now, with three projects on the move at once: the angels, the Sun card and the Fortitude card.

Today – getting some more detail into the skull of the angel himself.

In between hanging doors and moving endless quantities of books, a really great house warming party and taking a very nice group of students to the Getty to visit the extraordinary collections of icons that hang there, I have actually been working on the painting too! Here he is, with an almost complete first layer of paint over the entire panel, and a bit of detail work on the face of the angel himself. (The value is too dark in the shadows right now, and I will lighten it up with a layer of  lovely transparent Zinc white – one of the great secrets of oil painting!)

The web’s not working in the studio, which is a bit of a pain, so I’ve missed posting a stage that I would have liked to have shown, prior to the first layer of the sky getting blocked in, but it doesn’t add a huge amount to the process, so not to worry. Details now! 

Next weekend I’m going to meet Lama Pema Tendzin again, to learn mandala painting techniques from him in a workshop. Can’t wait! Having finished my Sun God painting at last I think I’d enjoy applying mandala techniques to another large piece similar to it.

I’m struggling to find time to paint while getting the house straight and prepare for summer school starting again tomorrow morning (I’m teaching beginning drawing and beginning painting), but I got to spend a bit of time on the studio this morning, and now I’m finally  in again this evening, after various problems, not least that I’m getting a summer cold and starting to feel crummy. Meh! (Wah wah wah…) Hot lemon and honey for me, then an early night.

It’s clear that this layer will be amended as I build toward the finished arrangement of skulls, what I’m doing is building a very general first look at the areas of light and shadow, breaking them down into quite simple pieces of the whole, using fingers and rag to lift white paint away from the black undercoat. Usually painters will use this technique – imaginatively known as “wipe-out” – to bring light areas up, but in this case I’m pulling shadows from the white by revealing more or less of the black undercoat.