Caitlyn’s coming over on Friday, so I should be getting serious about the painting next week. Keep an eye open here to watch the image develop. I will probably start work on Justice shortly too. The Golden Bowl is still moving, and I need to get some shots in the camera for Falling, which I still want to get moving forward.
I have GOT to get back into the studio. Enough of this preparation and rest. We go to Vegas in a fortnight for the alchemy conference. I’m looking forward to that.
I found this neat widget that allows visitors to draw attention to the sites they like on social networks. It’s really easy – click on the button on the top right, choose the networks you use, and follow the simple instructions.
I slept not a wink last night, with my dog Sydney farting and snoring at my feet and the tricky Santa Ana winds blowing hot dusty air through the trees outside. I had restless dreams when I did drift into shallow dozes, felt the creepings of dark shadows and imagined every creak to be the sound of ghosts and ghouls. Most of the noises were simply the sound of Syd’s stomach and her grumping about it.
Thanks to her indigestion keeping me awake I’ve been irritable and baggy eyed all day. No painting. On the up side, I found a quiet time after lunch to sit in my office for an hour or two and take a breather.Â
The photographer from the Ventura County Star arrived mid afternoon, and shot a plethora of photos in the gallery. I quite enjoy the process of doing a news photo, because the photographers generally dislike telling you what to do, because they’ve trained to shoot what’s there in front of them, not to arrange things to suit them. This means that they’ll shoot pretty much whatever you choose to do, so you can really enjoy coming up with ideas for the shots almost as if they were paintings.
Mike Adams has done a fantastic job preparing a four page brochure for the show, very clean, beautifully designed. I gets me excited about the potential for producing a book. The work looks great when its printed, and I have a lot of good shots of it now, and text shouldn’t be too hard to put together. So it’s really about money to produce it. I think there’s a profit to be made in books, which can provide a small but useful income, especially if you can produce several different texts that appeal in different ways, so you become collectible. One day at a time. Making a book will be a goal for next year.Â
Here’s a first draft for Justice. It’s far more stylized than the drawing for angelic temperance, but I’ll develop that drawing later. I’m enjoying this formal approach for a change. I think this is the natural progression from the very simple Numbers by Painting pieces I began and abandoned earlier this year. The number symbolism can carry into these large pieces fairly easily and add structure to the composition.
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I worked on a drawing for Justice today, producing a pretty decent rendering of a blindfolded woman, standing within a circle with a dress that doubles as a blade. The circle discretely becomes a yin yang symbol and includes the balance in the centre of each half of the duality. I’ll have to post the drawing here tomorrow because I managed to leave the sketchbook at work, as I often do, which is why I have three or four sketchbooks scattered around, at work, in my office, and at home so that I have no excuse. I plan to use my Pre-Raphaelite student as model for Justice. She’ll be perfect.
The beautiful dancer and choreographer Caitlyn Carradine of the Los Angeles Contemporary Ensemble is going to pose for me as Temperance. I’m so pleased she said she would – she’s exactly right for the painting.
As far as envy goes (not pride – my bad, apologies for the edit this evening) it’s the opposite sin to the virtue of Justice, so I need to figure out how I’ll express this in the Justice painting. It’s tricky. I have to mull this one over for a while.
I made a drawing of the seven virtues. I like the idea of putting them all together and somehow using the iconography of each to identify each figure, without the props that usually are included. 
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My painting and drawing students are excelling in their work, and need guidance, which I love to give, but means that I can’t make my own work. I must be honest and confess that after the hurly burly of getting the show up I have found it very easy to procrastinate, but I’m au point now, ready to get back into it, so I need to get on the ball and shoot pictures for the paintings and get on with the work. Fairly soon I’ll be able to show my students how to get their teeth into a larger piece of work because they’re getting deeply into making their first self portraits and will soon have the necessary skills to start being more independent. I like this group of drawers and painters very much, they’re doing really well.
A photographer from the Ventura County Star is coming over tomorrow afternoon to shoot pictures of the exhibit and a journalist from the paper has called and asked for information. I’ll keep an eye out for the story and post it when it comes out, of course.Â
I’ve been thinking about how to express the deadly sins in these paintings so that there’s a counterpoint to the virtues, because as always I’m interested in the duality of good and evil. The opposite of temperance is gluttony. I’n not sure that expressing gluttony by painting a lot of obese people is really what I’m after, but perhaps a more symbolic approach is better. Lots of pigs? Hedgehogs used to be thought of as a symbol of gluttony – a swarm of hungry hedgehogs?Â
Anyone know a friendly pig farmer in Southern California? I need pigs!
What’s the narrative in the painting? The steampunk angel rises from a rolling pile of pigs while pouring liquid from one jug to another without spilling a drop! Excellent! The narrative alone would be nonsense – allegory adds a layer of mystery and secrecy that I find intriguing.
Art Miler and Doug Barnett have put together a neat slideshow interview with me on the Kwan Fong Gallery website. Pretty cool. Check it out…
Here’s a new sketch version of the painting. I like the way the image is going, but it feels static, probably because of the influence of the tarot versions of the virtues, which are very presentational. She’s standing on a sphere, which will become the world, and I think I need to add some imagery of gluttony swirling around her, while the angel is unaffected, being the master of temperance. I’ll play with this next.
I will divide the coat into the four alchemical colours, obviously not entirely clear in this graphite drawing.
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At Web.archive.org you can find a lot of stuff that was once on the web that would be gone forever if these guys hadn’t preserved it, including my old site! Quite a trip down memory lane. I grabbed some quotes from famous people that I had forgotten I had collected (now posted as a page on the right bar). There are some nice pieces of correspondence too, including a letter from Cyn McCurry, the fabulous Texas painter, one of the best painters I know of anywhere.
I shopped with my kids for large overcoats for the painting, spending several cheery hours wandering down Melrose in Hollywood and Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. Lots of stores to lease in Hollywood, while the Ventura strip seems to be doing okay for now, but my neighbor who owns a business there says that business has been appalling, even worse than it was when 911 happened. Signs of the economic times.
We found an excellent medium brown leather overcoat and a waistcoat. I’m also thinking that the angel should wear flying goggles. I’m also looking for some very large costume wings, just on the off chance that there are some out there somewhere, otherwise I’ll have to find a stuffed eagle or something and match the light, remembering to light with some card cut out to resemble the shape and throw the proper shadow. I’d prefer to have something the model can wear, if possible.
I have two potential models in mind who would each bring something different to the painting. One of the two women is red haired and super-Pre-Raphaelite, while the other is an ethereal elvish blond. Both are gorgeous and will be a joy to paint. I am pretty taken with the idea of making paintings of all four of the virtues, so I’ll think about who would best fit each virtue.
I just received my contract from the Brand gallery in Glendale, CA, signed and sent it back to them. I’m looking forward to that show very much, May 16th – June 19th 2009. Before then, I’ll be showing work at the Las Vegas Alchemy Conference, then a piece in a Dreams show in Moorpark, CA. I’m looking for venues for next year.
