The Golden Bowl x

Posted on August 5, 2008 by pearce

img_7359.jpgWorking on smaller paintings is much more fiddly and cautious than the big ones. Here’s the result of this morning’s work to clean up the central figure in “The Golden Bowl”, which I’m beginning to enjoy immensely. There’s something slightly displaced about her shoulder that I’ll need to fix, and there’s so little colour that it’s basically an en grisaille work at present, so this is the time to fix whatever needs to be fixed before moving into the more developed layers.

I need to get some sketching done this afternoon to work out exactly what’s going into the background.

Additionally I’m looking back over my books to see which images I have already drawn up that would make good paintings so I can begin some more new works. I have three on the go right now, but two of them (The Golden Bowl and Falling Off) are pretty small, so they should go fairly quickly. I have lots of panels available for painting, having cut five sheets of really nice, well seasoned birch plywood into pieces last week. I expect to gesso several this week.

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Sky

Posted on August 4, 2008 by pearce

Fabulous sky tonight. Maybe I’ll use this for one of the paintings one day.

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Photo by Elizabeth 

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Bombers ix

Posted on August 4, 2008 by pearce

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Mountains en grisaille. Slow progress today, but it’s coming together. I want to make the range on the right light and that on the left dark, as it is at the Trona Pinnacles. It’s an additional layer of symbolic duality that merges together at the centre of the painting, embodying the trinity in the hermit. 

The sky tomorrow. 

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Crucifixion xi

Posted on August 4, 2008 by pearce

 

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It’s finished. 

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Studio visit

Posted on August 2, 2008 by pearce

Bert Green is coming over to see what I’ve been making, so I decided that I should get what I have spread out and see what state things are in. Paintings don’t stay perfect forever, and need occasional maintenance to keep them pristine, so I expect to find touch up work necessary on some of the pieces to clean up any bruises or dings. Usually this is minor work taking little time.

The studio looks pretty cool with the big works laid out, reminding me that I need to continue to make some smaller pieces too. I think it would be really great to make works that incorporate my Cabinet sculptural installation work into the paintings. Imagine a painting of a person using the artefacts I made, or meditating next to the grails. Very interesting. The kitsch painting movement started by Odd Nerdrum has a puritan strain to it that would find such paintings very difficult, because they would be kitsch paintings of things that could easily be mistaken for post-modernism. Regarding the Cabinet I think it’s ultra-reactionary to look so far back in time for inspiration, far beyond the issues of contemporary art.

Anyway, if only for the reason that such a series would challenge the expectations of the new movement, it’s worth pursuing, isn’t it?

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I went sailing today for the first time in a long while. How wonderful to skim along the ocean surface under sail, with the energy of the wind driving the boat before it. 

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Storm xxv

Posted on August 1, 2008 by pearce

Ogre was still wet, so I couldn’t do more to the crucifixion, so instead I worked on finishing up Amelia’s face and spent a long time defining the shadows of the ivy and getting detail work into the jewelry and helmet. I may have darkened things a touch too much, so I’ll probably get back into the piece Monday morning to rough things up a bit. So close to wrapping it up…

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Bombers viii

Posted on August 1, 2008 by pearce

I searched through my pictures for a long time this morning, looking for my landscape shots from the trip I made up there in December. Somehow I misplaced all of the horizontal images in the computer, and couldn’t find them anywhere. For a while I was pretty sure that they were gone for good, then I located them in a file buried in an old  iPhoto archive, i’ve been using Bridge for quite a while, and had forgotten that I had put them there.

img_7344.jpgReferring to the pictures means that I can do some justice to the landscape at the Trona Pinnacles, which is one of the weirder landscape on this earth, close to one of the worst towns ever built. Searching for the pictures took up enough time that I didn’t get much on canvas before it was time to get home to my kids for dinner, but you can see where this is going. I’m using the diagonal line from corner to corner as a guide for the tops of the pinnacles.  It’s pretty sketchy right now and there’s a lot more detail to come which will bring it to life.

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Bombers vii

Posted on July 31, 2008 by pearce

Working on the figure in Bombers is reflective of the fairly solitary life of a painter. I spend large amounts of time alone in the studio painting, sometimes seeing almost nobody. Yesterday I spoke to eight people all day including a visit to the local church to see my kids in a show. I feel like a hermit.

Silence and solitude are said to walk hand in hand. Silence is not necessarily the silence of sound, but can be the inner silence that comes from pure focus upon the task in hand. I recognize a contradiction in the solitary life I lead in the studio and the pleasure I gain by playing loud music when I paint. Is this reflective of satisfying an inner need for chaos, or indicative of a lack of social interaction? I suspect that it’s no accident that this hermit painting is happening now, as the summer in the studio draws toward its most peaceful period when there are no students to provide any distraction from solitude.

“If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found.”
–Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place 

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Crucifixion x

Posted on July 31, 2008 by pearce

I found my source pictures for the crucifixion dating back from 2000, when Ogre came over to visit and posed for the painting. I worked at the face for a couple of hours, getting a good layer down. It’s clearly too bright right now, so the next step will be to tone it down a little, but this can wait until this layer is dry because there are some good things here that I don’t want to wreck by attempting to continue. 

img_7341.jpg Because it’s Ogre I’m painting here I played Skinny Puppy’s “Last Rights” on the stereo, very loud. I do like to paint with loud music on. I know some painters insist that the only music that should ever be played in the studio is classical, but I like the edginess of nasty loud rock, and I do see its influence in the paintings, and I like it. I don’t want the paintings to be wishy washy, I want impact. 

Thinking about the tour of churches in Spring, I wonder if churches other that Lutheran ELCA will be interested. I’ll try the Lutheran churches first and see where it goes from there.

 

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Bombers vi

Posted on July 31, 2008 by pearce

I spent a few hours working the white stone and the megaliths. The sky will have to wait, as I became quite tired and took an early lunch, then returned to work on the crucifixion.

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