Back to the studio

Posted on February 26, 2009 by pearce

img_8824.jpgStill feeling pretty crummy this morning, enough to skip yoga and running, but I went to class and had the pleasant experience of teaching a bright and wide awake group of students life painting and drawing. I managed to find a little painting time for myself to continue working on the Sun card, laying down some flesh tones and a first layer of the wall and the ground. 

I feel as though I haven’t painted for quite a while, so it’s great to get back to work, and curiously I feel better for it. Tonight is the opening reception for the show in Santa Barbara, but I really don’t think I should drive all the way there and back until I feel 100% again, so I’ll head up there to see the performance on Saturday night.

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Theatre Sets, Lights and Costumes

Posted on February 25, 2009 by pearce

dsc_2493.jpgBeing involved in the tree project made me realize that I’ve never posted any of my photos of sets, so I’ve put together a page of pictures from a few past projects here. 

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Books about tarot cards

Posted on February 25, 2009 by pearce

While working on painting the cards, I’ve also been researching and writing about them as I create the images. I’ve had my Marseilles deck since I was a teenager in school, fascinated by the mysterious pictures that emerged from the brightly coloured cardboard covering, but not prepared for the amount of study it takes to really understand what lay behind their origins in the neo-Platonic Renaissance. Finding texts about the cards that are carefully researched and that rely on legitimate sources is pretty hard, because the cards have become so aligned with cartomancy that they have almost entirely been swallowed up by the divinatory sub-culture, but there remain a few writers whose work is really worth spending some time with on the quest to understand how the cards evolved from the tarrochi of the Visconti – Sforza family decks to the Marseilles decks and on into the popular occult decks of the twentieth century.

I’ve been reading and enjoying Decker and Dummett’s History of the Occult Tarot, which traces the influence upon the tarot of late 19th Century Victorian occult groups and their fragmented remains in the 20th Century, when the Golden Dawn collapsed and was succeeded by numerous organizations that used the deck as a structural key to their understanding of the universe. 

As an interpretive text from a Rosicrucian point of view, i.e. a Christian hermeticist’s approach, the Anonymous Meditations on the Tarot is unbeatable. The Anthroposophist turned Catholic Valentin Tomberg was actually the author of this lovely text, which provides beautifully prepared commentary on the tarot with multiple sources from mystics of all kinds. He makes up for his occasional lapses into evasive interpretations that avoid issues that may be uncomfortable to a Christian reader by offering delightful meditative journeys into his personal exploration of the arcana of the major trumps. These journeys may not be the best interpretations of the cards themselves, but they are a truly worthwhile exploration of the mind of a particularly well-studied hermeticist. 

 

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Peach tree bearing fruit

Posted on February 25, 2009 by pearce

img_8801.jpgMy tree is almost complete, with her spirals covered by hundreds of little lights glowing under the fabric that wraps the metal structure, concealing the fact that this is made from steel pipe. She’s not fully lit in this image, which shows her heart area glowing while the rest of her waits. There are some really good moments in the play when the tree is very beautiful – I’m happy with her.

img_8811.jpgNow I must get back to my yoga. I’m trying to keep a nasty laryngitis head cold at bay –  yoga and lots of garlic is my only defense right now.

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Bert!

Posted on February 22, 2009 by pearce

Bert Green made it to the studio for a very pleasant afternoon – the first time I’ve seen him in far too long. Last time I saw him I had short hair! He enjoyed seeing “As the Crow Flies” and wants to show it and some sculpture pieces in his gallery in Downtown Los Angeles. That’s great news! Bert does so much for art in Los Angeles, I’m really happy to be involved in his gallery. 

With the Santa Barbara project almost on its feet I will soon have to get deep into the Earth Day event here at CLU and in the Simi Valley Town Centre, and in addition the Glendale exhibit is looming on the horizon, with our first meeting in the space coming up in a week. I want to explore the theme of the alchemical tree in the exhibit, bringing the Alchemy Tree to their tree in the courtyard and the Peach Tree into the space, then creating a new tree related installation piece alongside the Neolithic Wonders works and the paintings.

 

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Phew.

Posted on February 21, 2009 by pearce

poster-design-final.jpgLast night Lukas and I were arriving at the theatre when he received a call from his brother letting him know that his father had just passed away – he’s obviously got a million things running through his mind right now, poor fellow, taking him out of the picture. So this has been an intense couple of days, but fortunately Garcia the props guy has stepped into the breach to help so it isn’t as bad a situation as it might be. We worked hard at getting the tree closer to completion by wrapping branches in lights, mounting little spotlights onto the ends of the branches, rigging the heart of the tree in the centre of the trunk and purchasing more copper for some smaller spirals that will go onto the centers of the branches. We lit the heart of the tree with five of the small spotlights and ran a lot of cable to power everything, then wrapped the branches in light, gauzy pale peach coloured fabric. The result is very attractive, easily the prettiest set I’ve done; most of my work has a dark edge to it, while this is baroque by comparison. As more fabric goes onto the pie the hard edges disappear and the whole piece becomes gentler and more romantic, which goes perfectly with the performance.

The factory sequences are very stylized, making extensive use of the metal things Ethan and I picked up at the Home Depot, which is very satisfying, and the rain sticks I built are working very well. I’ll post photos of the work so far shortly, when I can manage to remember to put the memory card back into my camera before I drive all the way to Santa Barbara and try to take pictures without it…

The play opens this Thursday. If you’d like to see it, let me know so I can see if there are any complimentary tickets available.

Muéveme, Muévete (The Magical Realism Project)
Thursday – Saturday, Feb. 26-28, 8 p.m., Porter Theatre, Westmont campus
$15 general admission, $7 students

Thursday – Saturday, March 5-7, 8 p.m.,Casa de la Raza, 601 E. Montecito Street, Santa Barbara
Free admission underwritten by Montecito Bank & Trusts

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Tree

Posted on February 20, 2009 by pearce

img_8771.jpgI drove to Santa Barbara this afternoon to bring the fabric to the tree and visit with Lukas for a while in order to figure out any issues that we might have with the tree, but there really aren’t any giant problems with it so far. I decided to turn the spirals downward because they were getting lost in the grid and lighting instruments. We tried wrapping the lights in the fabric, it’s pretty. We are going to need a lot more lights for there to be enough ambient light to see actors by.

 

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Lovely copper spirals

Posted on February 17, 2009 by pearce

 

Aren’t these lovely! Latest photo courtesy of Lukas in Santa Barbara where he’s working hard to build the tree. The spirals go onto the ends of the branches, vertically. I’m looking forward to seeing the small pieces go onto the branches at intervals as well. I plan on exhibiting the tree at the Simi Valley Town Center and in the Brand Gallery show in May, both times in slightly different incarnations. 

Posted in Making work, Theatre | 1 Comment

Big

Posted on February 16, 2009 by pearce

img_8760.jpgI’ve been working on the geomantic man piece and figuring out how I might eventually be satisfied with him. I’m re-silvering the dark blue ground around him down to a low horizon line where I’m planning to paint a line of men looking up at the figure, so that he becomes a sun god being contemplated by a crowd – I’ve only done the left side so far, the right side will mirror it. I started work rationalizing the symbols so that they reflect the alchemical work of combining the elements to make the stone. When they’re all done I’ll explain them carefully. It’s making more sense now. I couldn’t get much further with the face of the sun today, because that Cadmium yellow has to dry thoroughly before I get to play with the surface.

Janet brought her artist friend Francesco Masci from New York over to visit, so we spent a congenial hour at the studio talking art and looking at his paintings. To my pleasure I recognized one as a portrait of Paul Lucchesi, who’s coming to CLU for a residency in Fall. 

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A golden monad

Posted on February 16, 2009 by pearce

img_8759.jpgI worked on the sun and the rain drops today, sanding the gesso down then painting a layer of the bole and sanding that too. Once it was washed and dry I added a thin coat of adhesive and gilded the surface. It was so much easier to do this with a dry area to gild to, because the leaf will only stick to the sticky part of the ground, and can be easily brushed from the clean and dry surface beside it.

In the alchemical process this is the moment of coagulation, when the creation of the stone has been completed and fixed. Now it can be used to multiply gold, for healing and for growth. Gemini is the sign because it illustrates the combination of two things into one.

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