Crucifixion iii

Posted on July 10, 2008 by pearce

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I roughed in the tattoo on Lynn’s arm. It’s very basic right now and will get some added colour, then a layer of skin tone over the top of it to drop it back into the arm properly. Right now it’s too bright and sitting too high on the surface, so it needs some help to recede.  

 

It’s the seal of Martin Luther. There’s more about him, and why I’m interested in him here. 

 

In this picture you can also see the newly darkened shirts of the men at the top and left. They were pulling focus from the centre of the crowd. 

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Falling off iii

Posted on July 10, 2008 by pearce

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I had a productive if scattered morning broken up by meetings and preparation. I prepared two canvases  by stretching them onto a piece of 3/4″ plywood with a layer of plastic between the canvas and the wood so the painting doesn’t end up being completely stuck to a great big lump of wood. I stretched it as usual, pulling centre edge against centre edge, then painted four or five layers of gesso onto it. The meetings took place between coats, so it worked out pretty well in the end. 

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Another new look

Posted on July 9, 2008 by pearce

I really didn’t like the way that last arrangement looked, so here’s a better one. Hope you like it.

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Crucifixion ii

Posted on July 9, 2008 by pearce

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A productive day today. I restretched the Crucifixion painting onto its stretcher bars, spraying the back of the canvas with water to make the inevitable creases drop out, then mixed some black and refreshed the dark areas of the front. The area of the moon I retouched is no longer visible and the painting has become brighter and cleaner as a result of the work. I deepened the shadows on a few figures on the right after I had taken this picture, so there is more of a sense of a spotlight hitting them, like a prison searchlight.

 

I’m really happy to see this painting coming back to life again. Now I’ll paint a tattoo on the arm of the dark haired woman on the right side, and get to work adding details into the piece. 

 

I’ve made plans for taking photos next Friday of one of my students who’s willing to pose for the Falling painting, so things are moving in the right direction. For this painting I’m going to take a leaf out of my former student Chris Marshall’s book and simply stretch canvas onto a flat board, prime it and allow the painting to find its own scale, then build a frame to its size when it’s complete. Painting on a pre-made canvas limits the painter to that previously made size, so I think it will be quite liberating to work it the other way round.

 

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Falling off ii

Posted on July 8, 2008 by pearce

The reason I mentioned that my wife’s a Scorpio and I’m a Virgo is that I think the falling figure will be a virginal girl falling upward toward the Scorpio constellation.

This one’s a mixture of dream and reality.

In alchemy Virgo is said to correspond with Distillation and with the tarot card the Hermit.

Scorpio corresponds with Separation and with the tarot card Death. The Death card in tarot doesn’t necessarily mean death, it’s more a symbol of transformation from one state of being to another. It’s an initiatory death in that the old self dies, but the new self emerges from that passing.

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Falling off i

Posted on July 8, 2008 by pearce

I shot reference pictures of ivy for the Aviator’s Dream painting, but the sun was far too high in the for them to be really useful other than as a resource for the shapes of the leaves and how the network of tendrils and shadows works. The light has to be at least similar. Next step, to wait until evening at my home and take a close look at the ivy that grows on the bank between my neighbor’s house and mine. I’ve tried to destroy it for years, because it chokes the lilies, but now I’m at least slightly glad that I failed to kill it.

Reference photos are great, but have to be treated with caution – are the pictures going to work together? Is the light in each picture similar, is the colour temperature similar? A decent painter will be able to make it up as they go along to some extent, but it takes a while to get to that point, and in the meantime there’s nothing wrong with using a picture to help.

A painting isn’t a photograph. 

This evening I’ll do some preliminary drawings for this Falling Off piece. I don’t often do any really well prepared drawings for the paintings, preferring to resolve the issues in paint. I love seeing paintings which have the story of their making concealed beneath the final layer. It’s an additional layer of the painter’s narrative, added to the narrative of the image itself. 

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New look

Posted on July 7, 2008 by pearce

I heard from a good friend that he found it hard to read white text on a black background, so I thought I’d try this new look. Hope you like it.

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Winding Up

Posted on July 7, 2008 by pearce

This morning I took some of my students to the art supply store to pick up materials for their summer school class. I’m teaching a basic painting class at CLU, in Thousand Oaks over the summer. It’s a great way to keep my studio discipline going because I simply can’t procrastinate, I’ve got to be in the studio working. I love to paint with my students because it forces me to rethink what I do constantly, and pass on the tricks of the trade, and they enjoy watching as a painting develops, and learn from the decisions I make in the process.

I think I know what I need to paint next. Quite dream related, an image of a person falling off the world through a single point perspective image of trees centered on Scorpio. It’s the moment I woke to under the pines near Shaver Lake, when I felt as though gravity was no longer working and I was going to fall off the earth.

My wife’s a scorpio. I’m a Virgo. 

 

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Christopher Marshall, Untitled, Oil on linen, 32″ x 30″. 

My friend and ex-student Christopher Marshall has become a fantastic painter over the years. After he studied with the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum in Iceland he went to the New York Academy to do his Masters degree in painting, and now he’s off to Liepzig to do a residency there. I love his work these days and just bought another of his pieces, shown here.

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Sources

Posted on July 6, 2008 by pearce

The sources I use for making the work I show vary: some of it comes from my research into prehistoric British megalithic sites, and the correspondences I find there with Pythagoras, alchemy and archaic religions. Imagery from alchemy is so mystifying that it requires study to understand what the writers mean by their language and illustrations, which mix an allegorical mystical philosophy firmly grounded in an early renaissance Christian foundation with early chemistry practice veiled in secret symbolism. My interest in alchemy predominantly comes from the Pythagorean philosophy I have found there, and I must admit that I love Elizabethan England! 

Paradoxical Emblems

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I’ve started collecting alchemical texts that have been translated and hand-bound in leather by the incomparable Adam McLean, who has been quietly working away for several decades to translate and print alchemical texts that have languished unstudied for hundreds of years. I have his edition of Robert Fludd’s “Divine Numbers”, which is an English translation of two books about number philosophy derived from Pythagoras but in a mystical Christian frame. They’ve been taken from his great “Utriusque Cosmi Historia”, an encyclopedic study of natural science published in Latin in 1617.

Next I purchased a copy of Adam’s “The Book of Distillation – the First Book” by Hieronymous Braunschweig, published in 1500. This is an alchemical manual written for the educated public, simplifying the process of distillation of herbs so that it could be readily understood and making early herbal medicine available to ordinary people.

Today I opened a copy of “The Paradoxical Emblems of Dionysius Andreas Freher”, a delightful series of alchemical mandalas expressing in drawings Pythagorean number philosophy. Each image is intended to be studied and meditated upon. Adam has cleaned up the images from the original dodgy prints and translated the Latin.

One of the joys of receiving books from Adam is that they arrive from Scotland sealed in cardboard packages that upon opening them release the most delicious fragrance of the leather binding the texts. 

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Recharged

Posted on July 5, 2008 by pearce

I’m back from a week in the mountains camping in the forest with no internet access and no cellphones. Fantastic!

I slept under the open sky each night, looking for satellites, spotting shooting stars and bathed in starlight. Scorpio was directly above, surrounded by high pine trees that created a powerful single point perspective centered on the constellation. I woke one night feeling as though I was about to fall off the earth into the open sky. 

I’ll resume posting now, and on Monday I’ll be back in the studio working on finishing the Aviator’s Dream and starting a new piece. 

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