Michael Pearce

I’ve fixed up the gold leaf bordering the slippers and rendered an en grisaille layer. They already appear to be pink because the gold leaf sits over a carmine red gesso, so when I sanded the area I thought the slippers would fit into the red came up strongly, showing through the zinc white I put on next. The next layer will be a peachy white, probably using a titanium white, that will be denser and closer to the right soft pinky peach of the pointe shoes.

I’d like to add a few other trompe l’oeil objects into the image like post it notes, or a moth, but realistically I don’t think I have time. Nevertheless this has been fun to make, and hopefully it will make some money for the Ballet Academy.

I’ve been deeply buried in paperwork for the last few days, completely missing Imbolc and Bridget’s day – Candlemas passed almost unnoticed and I spent the time worrying about getting all sorts of information together for my tenure review package which had to be submitted today (Monday – not Tuesday as the date over there shows.)

I was asked to come up with a painting for an auction to raise money for my daughter’s ballet school, so I’m under the gun to quickly produce a ballet oriented work for them. I love ballet and my daughter benefits so much from practicing the formal grace of ballet, so this one’s a pleasure to do. I like the contrast of the beat up shoes the dancers all wear with the delicacy and control of the movements they make, so I decided to paint a pair of old pointe shoes. As the work gets closer to completion tomorrow I’ll post a photo – it’s a quick wet on wet work, over a gilded panel.

I’m really looking forward to spending the day in the studio tomorrow, missing three days is just killing me.

I was able to get started drawing Christine today, and I’m really enjoying getting this image down onto canvas – right now this is a graphite sketch, not quite complete. I’m teaching Life drawing and painting on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I’m a firm believer in showing the students what I do when I’m painting, so when I can I’ll work with them. It’s harder at the beginning of the semester than at the end because I need to help them much more, but I think they benefit greatly from seeing that I’m doing what I teach them, it’s not made up! I also screw up my work sometimes, and I think it’s encouraging for them to see that I’m perfectly capable of making as much, if not more of a mess as they are.

Although it’s a pretty rough sketch at present I really like this image of Christine looking down at her unborn baby. It reminds me of when my kids were born, full of potential. Wonderful, what a moment! It’s going to turn into a lovely painting.

  

I’ve learned how to upload images in a workaround way, so here’s the state of Justice and Temperance prior to gilding them, and below, the process of adding the red clay undercoat, then temperance with the leaf applied.

  You can see where the sanding of the gesso layer has damaged the dark Prussian blue background, so I’ll put down another layer to clean that up, then after a little work on the hands and the bottles, the addition of some scales and some work on Justice’s sword, this pair will be complete!

I’ve gilded the spheres that Justice and Temperance stand upon, and they look great. I still can’t get photos posted to the site, and that’s frustrating, but I’m hoping that it will be fixed very soon. Technology is so great when it works properly, and so insanely frustrating when it doesn’t. I think the gold is a little too bright as it stands in its raw state, particularly in the case of the Temperance piece, so I’m tempted to glaze about the edges of it to drop them back into the background. I’m much less concerned about Justice with the balance of value being on the light side anyway, so I’ll probably let that one be.

I’m looking forward to painting and drawing tomorrow with my friend and colleague Terry Spehar-Fahey. She’s going to visit my life classes so that she can spend some time working from the model. I really admire the way she works, she’s very fast, producing wonderful likenesses using a “wet on wet” technique.