I’ve joined the Amazon affiliates program.
I spend a ridiculous amount of money buying books at Amazon and I really like the platform, so I think it’s worth participating. Please visit the new Gilded Raven store when you’re looking for a book about alchemy and its related topics. I ultimately hope to create a definitive bibliography on alchemy, made easily accessible through the amazon site.
Eventually I’ll sell prints of my work here too, give me time…
No painting today, instead I turned my attention to doing some more study of alchemical symbolism, in particular Adam, the first man, who is used as a symbol of the prima materia in the alchemical process. The goal of alchemy is to reconstitute the elements into the original material from which God made the creation. Adam is symbolic of this as the microcosmic version of the creation.
In a fit of ego-mania I did a search for my name on an anagram solving website. It turns out that “Michael†is an anagram of “Al chemi†(The arabic word from which we get “Alchemy†is الكيمياء al-kīmiĒ).
“Michael Pearce†is an anagram of “Alchemic Pereaâ€. Perea is a region in the first century Kingdom of Herod the Great on the East of the Jordan river, once known as Moab.
(It’s also “impeach cereal†“piecemeal arch†and “cheaper malice†among other things, but they’re not nearly as much fun or as interesting as the alchemic one, given what I do.)
Here’s my favorite anagram though: “Michael John Pearce†is an anagram of “Alchemic Pere Jonahâ€. The father (French “father”) of Jonah (famously swallowed whole by a whale) was the prophet Amittai, whose name means “my truth†in Hebrew (and there’s an excellent anagram found in his name too, which you can figure out for yourself! LOL!).
I was able to find these anagrams with great ease thanks to Wordsmith.
After an interminable journey through every red light in the San Fernando Valley to get to my favorite art store this afternoon to get gold leaf and sundry stuff my friend Steve, owner of said favorite art store, directed me to a sign painters’ store to get the correct sizing (esoteric artists’ term for “glue”) for gilding. While I was there I checked out their brushes because among other interesting and obscure weapons in their painting arsenal, sign writers use lining brushes, also called pinstriping brushes, or “striper” brushes, which I use for drawing in paint in the opening and final stages of making a painting. These brushes hold a lot of paint, produce a consistent width of line and there’s a nice range of sizes. Normally they’re used for putting “go-faster” stripes on cars.
So, today was like a holy grail event as far as brushes go. I found this hand made beauty in the cabinet with about a thousand others in a variety of larger sizes (this is the finest, a 000). With this fabulous little gem of a brush, I can paint a consistent line spanning about a foot  without running out of paint! I guess the Mack company has been around for ages, making brushes for sign writers since 1891. This particular work of brush manufacturing art is a “squirrel hair sword striper”; a very big name for a very small brush.
 Ultramarine Blue is such a lovely rich choice; a dark but  transparent colour that I find it hard to resist using it in a painting. It makes blacks intense and enlivens the edges between people and their background in the picture. 
I laid down a layer of the ultra blue over the grey of the sky, to enrich and vitalize it, then removed a lot of it with a large soft rag about the moon, giving the light a chance to shine intensely from there.Â
I was out of town in Ventura for the last couple of days, so I had no opportunity to paint, but I did get a bit of time working on learning more about alchemy, studying a dictionary of alchemical symbols with astonishingly few pictures in it. Good dense descriptions based on alchemical texts, not contemporary interpretations thereof.
I just learned that I’m going to be able to do a talk at the alchemy conference as well as showing my paintings, so I’ll have an opportunity to describe my process to people who understand what I’m talking about. What a treat! Several of my traveling friends are going to come to Vegas with me so we’re all able to enjoy the discussion and learn from the assembly of experts together.
I’ll be presenting an illustrated discussion of my work Friday evening 6.30pm in Hall C.
Here’s a radical change in the appearance of the painting. The sky approaches its completed state, needing a yellow / white moon and a glaze of Ultramarine blue, with some stars and haze to complete it. However, it will need a little care to smooth it out and soften some areas which are a little brushy. I’ll also put in some light, milky clouds lit by the silvery moonlight. Of course, the moon will sit in that light patch in the left where that orange circle was until quite recently.
The hermit is now seen in a pool of light, isolated from the desert surroundings, which seem larger.
I painted the first layer of the lantern over its initial drawing, getting the flat brass colour with a raw sienna and a touch of black, then some white to bring up the value a little.
I asked a couple of visitors about the yin yang, which didn’t seem to bother them, in fact one of them said they hadn’t noticed it was there – so that’s perfect, it’s a hidden secret of the painting now. Speaking of hidden secrets, I thought I’d emphasize the little peaks on the horizon that sit at 1.62 with a touch of moonlight backlight.
Welcome members of T3P and TSS!
Enjoy the site.
I’d especially point you to the painting I’m working on right now, working title: Bombers.
It’s fun to follow the posts from the beginning of the work to where it’s at now.
The day was broken into several short sections, which made getting a clear shot at painting for any great length of time tricky, but was perfect for getting gesso onto panels in preparation for the “As the Crow Flies” magnum opus.
The birch panels are well seasoned now, having laid out for a long time, but I discarded a couple which had split, leaving me only the stable pieces for preparation. I painted gesso for hours, punctuated by lunch, the arrival of twenty new easels for our painting classes, Art and Doug arriving to record audio for the slideshow thing for the web and my children’s repeated arrivals and departures. By the way, the slideshow should end up resembling the one they made about Cyn McCurry’s work, which can be seen here. There are some good pictures of her paintings at the bottom of that page too.
There are about 160 square feet of birch plywood here, each with at least five coats of gesso on them. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much prepared wood in the studio at one time. I’m looking forward to getting the red and gold on them. Painting the black crows will be relatively easy, but perhaps repetitive. The main piece is essentially complete, with the exception of the seated figure, which needs a couple more layers and some careful observation to pull it off properly.Â
I don’t have the mordant yet, so I’ll have to wait to get these panels much further along. Back to the Bombers piece tomorrow!
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I run the Kwan Fong Gallery at CLU in Thousand Oaks. I generally keep some separation between my own work and the work I do as a curator, but I think this particular show is so intriguing that I want to write about it here too. Duncan Simcoe is an artist working here in Southern California in one of the most exciting art scenes in the world. Los Angeles is jumping these days.
I love what Duncan does with his work; there’s a stark simplicity to the materials he uses, yet a depth to the images that is simultaneously challenging and moving. He’s concerned with suburban life and the challenge of searching for the divine in the course of our lives – the distance between us and God. The works are religious, but contemporary, and they work effectively to encourage our individual searches for the mystic Christ, always distant, and always personal.
In addition to his suburban works Duncan has made drawings in paint about the battle between the descendants of Abraham, using unexpected renderings of boxers, oil gushers, pigs and shopping carts as jarring images to bring his observation that the conflict is mythical in proportion. Perhaps surprisingly for such potentially controversial material the works don’t take a side in the contemporary struggle between Palestinians and Jews, they simply observe that this is an epic that has been happening for centuries.
I should add that I’ve posted some of this material onto the Art Blog on the CLU website.
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