Although I haven’t completed the skeleton yet I used some remaining Van Dyke Brown to bring the background to the edges of the realized work. I should finish this fairly soon, within a couple of days, I hope.
He’s looking good, huh?
I got pretty tired today by about seven o’clock, and I still want to make a panel for a skull painting that I’d like to make within the next couple of weeks. Up early in the morning for yoga and a run, so I must get on with it!
The four eight by eight panels are leaning against the wall looking quite inviting. This morning I did some fix-it work with Jason, liberally applying glue between the frames and the plywood to make certain that there was no potential for looseness in them, so now they’re very solid and simply need canvas stretched over them. Although I’m looking forward to getting these pieces started, I do need to pay attention to my priorities and continue with the cards project, completing these first four, then taking on other projects alongside the cards as I produce the complete deck of major trumps one by one.
My three panels for the Indian lady piece have turned out nicely, so I will need to gesso them and find an appropriate model. I have shot pictures for this before, but didn’t like the results, which really didn’t look like the lady in the dream. Somewhere I’ll find the perfect model.
I’ve been moving down the body of the skeleton toward the pelvis, building shadows with the Van Dyke Brown and adding highlights with Titanium White. I chose to lose the sanded background and isolate the skeleton against the darkness, increasing the stark contrast of white on black, so here the dark is being built around the lower bones. I need to compare the skeleton with the painting closely to make sure I haven’t made any glaring errors.Â
It was a quiet day, alternating between working on the bones and making panels for the Indian lady, which went very smoothly. I really appreciate having the space and equipment to be able to do this kind of work so easily. It’s going to be great for the students too; they’ll save a fortune by making their own panels and bars.
Now that the wood-shop is almost complete I’m able to produce materials with far more ease than before. I dare say that I can make almost any size of panel my imagination leads me to at this point, although scale and storage may be an issue. I started work on the panels for the Indian lady dream pieces – remember those? All the pieces are cut and the first one is drying, being glued and clamped. I need to buy a lot more corner clamps to make this practical for the students use.
I’m beginning to feel the arrival of the Brand show upon me, so I will spend a little time preparing paintings for their journey and pulling pieces of the Cabinet installation from storage.
I continued work on the bones, getting most of the rib cage and the left shoulder and upper arm done as well, listening all the while to 1970’s Ozzy era Sabbath recordings and Metallica’s new recording – it seemed appropriate somehow considering the guitar hero pose the skeleton’s standing in. Back to Mozart’s Requiem Mass later.
It’s really tricky work, requiring concentration to make sure that the ribs stay in order and that they all correspond to their counterparts in the back. There are some interesting pieces of this particular painting puzzle – I noticed that the skeleton I’m painting was cast from someone who had clearly broken a rib in life which healed set back slightly off its proper angle, giving him a bend in the left side of the rib cage that normally wouldn’t be there. I corrected it in the painting, if only because I have a very strong memory of going to an art gallery with my parents – both medical professionals, one a radiologist, the other a dentist – and listening to them discuss the problems of a skeleton in one of the paintings we saw. They picked out all the health issues that would have been caused by the artist’s failure to get things right in the rendering, critically demolishing the painting; consequently I’m determined that the bones in this painting should be right so that should Doctors look at my work they will appreciate the accuracy of it, not the mistakes.Â
The sky has been fantastic all day – rolling great white cumulus clouds around over a rich blue background, like a cauldron in the heavens. I’m increasingly interested in clouds as elements of the paintings, and I’ll probably include some rich sky-scapes in the angel pieces.
This is a beautiful thing. It’s the giant pile of panels that is now leaning against the East wall of the studio waiting for images to be painted upon them. There are four eight feet square panels and all of the canvases I stretched onto the plywood a few weeks ago. The panels need some glue and nailing to make them secure, then they’ll  have some canvas stretched over them and gesso to prime the surface for a good solid ground
I think they will all become angel paintings. Anyway, with two more card sized canvases set aside and all of these pieces prepared I’ll be ready for a good solid summer of painting.
  
The twins are drying behind me now, having traded places with Death, whose posture reminds me of a metal guitarist and makes me smile each time I look at him. I’ve spent a happy hour or two working on the skull, building more accurately defined shadows and adding a few carefully placed highlights. Now that the first layer is down and mostly accurate it’s a matter of building adding a layer of some creamy yellows and cool greys into the surfaces, getting the detail of the teeth.
I’m looking forward to working on the rest of the bones, with all those lovely accretions that add texture to the ends of the long ones. The skull needs a third layer to pull out the highlights.
I’m really enjoying working on this – it’s a nice mixture of technical painting with a rock and roll flavor and it’s good preparation for a private project I’m going to do over the Easter break: a mural including a large skull.
Three hands, two heads. Finally back on a roll, I got the body and arm of the left hand boy more fully realized, fixed the outline of the right hand and repainted the background, which had become quite dirty from the repeated retouching of his face. I’ll re-establish the blues of the sky later when I’m content that I don’t need to continue working on the face. That eye still isn’t quite right, although it’s coming together at last.
I need to dig out some reference pictures of old walls that I shot in Avebury, England, where the great megaliths stand around a medieval village. I remember thinking that the people walking by as I shot them must have thought I was completely do-lally-bananas photographing walls when there were all those fantastic prehistoric stones scattered around.
I’ll paint the glow of the forehead chakra on the left hand boy and the heart chakra on the right one, following Tomberg’s suggestion that the card refers to the balance of the mind and the heart. I like the symbolism of this, which interferes little with the more alchemical interpretation I am more drawn to: the rising of the alchemical pair from the nigredo, being washed clean by the aqua vita of the sun.
This needs to dry now, so I’ll move back to the Death card.
The words of the Brahman to Alexander the Great, from Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander:
“King Alexander, each man possesses no more of this earth than the patch we stand on; yet you, though a man like other men, except of course that you are restless and presumptuous, are roaming over so wide an area away from what is your own, giving no rest to yourself or others. And very soon you too will die, and will possess no more of the earth than suffices for the burial of your body.”
205, P.A Brunt (translation and commentary) Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri, Volume 2, 1983, Harvard.
The second twin’s face has another layer of paint on it because I realized that I had made an error in the positioning of the nose and mouth when I had my first go at it. The right hand eye is still not right, and I’ll have to fix that, but it’s simply a matter of changing the angle a little and making it a touch larger. so it should be fairly straightforward. My son saw the first twin’s face for the first time this afternoon; it was a big treat to see his pleasure at finally being in one of my paintings. I’ll include my kids more now that the world I’m painting isn’t as bleak as it used to be. In the last year I’ve noticeably moved toward softer subject matter and increased the amount of  light in the paintings.
I hardly did any creative work at all in the last few days, so it’s been a little slow, but I hope to make up for lost time this Sunday. The administrative work I had to do instead and the extra sleep I got will pay off in the long run.
I’ve been reading Arrian’s account of Alexander the Great’s invasion of India, which he held from Pakistan to the Indus. It seems that the Macedonians believed that India had been visited in their epic past by Dionysos, who may have been recognized as the equivalent of Shiva.Â
I’m curious about the relationship between Indian philosophy and that of the West, because the trade routes between India and the Mediterranean were clearly well travelled after Alexander’s invasion, even when the collapse of the Macedonian empire came after his death.
Three Wise Men from the East? Brahmans? It’s interesting speculation.
