Here’s a shot from the dress rehearsal of the play, which is now over. Lukas brought the tree down to the studio for me today, so it will be ready for a new incarnation in Simi Valley for Earth Day. This year I’m expecting to work with recycled computer circuit boards which will be hung in large numbers from the branches of the tree. Don’t you think the symbolism of the tree of fruit of knowledge of good and evil contrasted with computers is too good to miss? (Sorry Apple!)
I liked the earlier work on the sky, but felt that the clouds needed a little more substance, so this afternoon I took the easel outside and painted from the white cumulus clouds drifting smartly across the California blue sky. These skies need to go a bit bluer yet to match the Cerulean sky we have here, but this is good for now and will get better.
I began working on the figures of the boys before the sun, catching the top half of the right hand lad quite nicely. I’ll get more done this evening and post tomorrow. Justice has me scratching my head a little, as I know roughly what I want to achieve, but I’m not sure where to find reference for it. I’m considering driving up the coast and camping a little, just to search out the right landscape for this, but perhaps I’ll find what I want up by the Vasquez rocks, where the Flintstones movie was shot (and every car commercial you ever saw) with all those craggy edges pushing out of the ground.
I liked the cloudy sky in the Temperance painting well enough to do the same thing in the Sun piece, laying down a patchy coat of blue, ragged off carefully to avoid all the gold – fiddly work because of all those curving edges. You’d think that it would be easy enough to simply paint over the whole surface, then wipe away the paint from the gilded surfaces, but there are a couple of problems with that approach: first the gold is so thin that rubbing it with a cloth will abrade the surface enough to fade it, letting the red gesso show through, which is what you see in old churches where gilded surfaces have been cleaned repeatedly and left un-restored; and second, the oil of the paint leaves a microscopic residue over the gold that dulls it, no matter how much you try to clean it.
I shot pictures of Jen as Fortitude. She wore a beautiful Edwardian dress picked out for her by Heather (one of my students who has an eye for fashion and loves to be involved with anything to do with clothes) and looked absolutely gorgeous, so I’m considerably happier with my progress on that project. I have photos of models for several of the cards now, so I’m ahead of the game and can proceed with painting without running out of reference materials.
I’ve laid out five decks of cards in the studio so I can compare them to each other, looking for compositional choices and trying to figure out the most common themes in the images. In most of the cards Fortitude is portrayed as a young woman either holding open the jaw of a beast – a lion or something like it – but in the Pierpont Morgan deck it’s a young man with a club swinging at the beast; a completely different image with a very different interpretation.
There’s an article about the show by Bojana Hill in the Santa Barbara Independent describing the tree as a  “beautiful centerpiece”. Nice!
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It’s one hundred percent humidity here in Thousand Oaks (it’s raining), so my paint won’t dry, but being unable to continue with the Sun meant that I had no good excuse for not getting back to Justice, who needs a background of some sort. So I figured out the golden ratio (1 : 1.62) of the vertical dimension and added a horizon line, then put down a thin coat of blue, wiping almost all of it off again to leave a patchy blue and white that will make the base for the sky.Â
The next layer was a grayish white that gave the clouds some body, using a rag to blend them into the previous layer. I need to consider the foreground more, although I’m pretty sure that there will be tall trees breaking the horizon, suggesting the relationship of heaven to earth.
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I learned a valuable lesson about discipline today – first I came upon this photo and Reuters story about a Buddhist monk who has repeated his obeisance in the same spot so often that his footprints have been deeply worn into the wooden floor of the temple. Here’s a video showing him going through the motions.Â
Later in the day I stopped to get gas and waited as the attendant finished his evening genuflections to Allah. I half expected him to stop to take my money, but he had other priorities in mind and completed his cycle of prayers before attending to the till.
Daily practice in the studio is a very similar discipline to both the monk’s and the gas station guy’s dedicated prayers. I think the practice of creative production is a prayer in itself, directly imitating the creative principle of the divine. I’m quite sure that the monk had days during those years of devotion on which he didn’t feel like doing his prayers, but went ahead and did it anyway, just as the gas station attendant had his priority to his prayer in place over his need to make a living selling gasoline. In the same way I need to have the discipline to continue with the work even when I really don’t want to, or don’t feel like it, or think I have better things to do.
It’s the regular practice of painting that makes it fluid and good, and will gradually deepen my creative footprints into the work.
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There are a huge number of photos of the dress rehearsal of Muéveme, Muévete  here, including some good images of the set and lighting work I designed for the show.Â
I put in some time on the sky of the Sun painting, a first layer of white that will become blue later on, and adding some transparent colour to the golden drops falling from the golden disc of the sun. Fiddly work, but a worthwhile effect. I love the reflective quality of the gold beneath the paint, it’s really not available in quite the same way using any other materials.
The basic shape of the painting is complete, so it’s really about how the details get there now. There are thirteen drops coming from the sun. I chose to colour six red, six blue (which looks greenish over the gold) and one yellow. I like this number because if the sun is taken to represent the avatar Christ, the twelve drops are the disciples including Matthias, the replacement of the traitor Judas (who has the yellow drop).
The artists in the May exhibit at the Brand Library Gallery in Glendale got together yesterday to figure out who would put which works into the exhibit, the opening of which is moving inexorably closer (to my horror February has slipped into March, and we watch the year slipping away as quickly as melting butter.) We are a pleasant group – co-operative decisions about naming the show and the use of the space were reached with ease and kindness, and I was left feeling very content that this will be a good experience. I plan to exhibit the peach tree as an installation with the Cabinet sculptures and the paintings, calling the whole thing “Mr. Pearce’s Cabinet of Alchemical Wonders”. It’s a spacious gallery, with nice high ceilings and a generous skylight that I think will accommodate the tree nicely. I’d like to lay gravel about it in a circle that leads as a pathway to the grails piece, in a large scale version of the circular patterns found in Neolithic rock art.
Our curator at the gallery is going to look into whether or not I am able to set up a reflux still to extract the essence of Glendale while the exhibit is up. If they go with the idea, I think this will be an excellent addition to the installation.
The Brand Gallery was added to the Brand Library in 1969. The library itself was founded by a remarkable man, Leslie Brand, known as “the father of Glendale”, who donated his spectacular mansion and surrounding parkland to the city he helped to found. His unusual grave is marked by one of the pyramids that are sometimes found in Californian graveyards. I think I’ll take some of the earth and leaves from the parkland that lies around the gallery, paying a little tribute to this man by distilling the essence of his town from the natural environment in which he rests.
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Boxing Jennifer is a painting I made for Jennifer Lynch (the director of Boxing Helena), who I’ve always been fond of. She has turned her life around recently, having just completed a new film called Surveillance which debuted at Cannes this year. Awesome! We showed our paintings together years ago in the Hollywood Zappa gallery and restaurant, Lumpy Gravy. I’d love to see her again, she was having a tough time then, but she was lovely. We traded paintings after the show closed – she got this one from me and I got an Eraserhead-like painting of a dark figure carrying a pink embryonic baby.
I’ve included the painting here because even though I made this before I got really deeply into the study of alchemy, it shows a woman going through an alchemical transformation. She’s the alchemical Queen, being put through the trials of purification until she’s ready for the spiritual union with the King, then becoming the quintessential purified being.
I did a little googling and found that she’s also been working on a movie called Hisss, which is about a Nagini-like snake woman. The snake in alchemy is a symbol of Hermes, whose caduceus rod shows the male and female principles as snakes intertwined around a rod to create the one thing. It’s also found as the ourobouros that endlessly devours its own tail.
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There’s a particularly interesting, if skeptical blog about the origin of tarot cards here. Very objective in his stance, the writer is only interested in factual sources and is determined to cut through speculative occult theories to find out what the origins of the deck may be. Well researched, clearly written material. He clearly wishes to set the context for tarot cards as a moral allegorical journey through the sequence of the trumps, and looks for examples from the period that defend his thesis (derived from Moakley’s “Tarot Cards Painted by Bembo”) that the trumps are similar to triumphal processions put on by the Sforzas and other renaissance lords.Â
