Sunday, March 3, 2013

"Heaven & Earth": Process Notes

Now that my work's on public display, I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk a bit about my process.  Here's the gist of it.

First, I get an idea.  I get ideas all the time, actually, far more than I can ever implement, which is a good thing.  Sometimes they pan out and sometimes they don't.  Sometimes I think I'm onto something only to run into a dead end halfway through it.  But sometimes it works out happily.  You can never quite predict these things.  Anyhow, hoping for the best, I immediately start sketching thumbnails.  I tend to draw them no larger than a baseball card, sometimes as small as a postage stamp.  I want them to read easily and quickly at any size.  If a painting's going to be any good, it should make some decent sense even from a long way off.

In this case, my idea was to paint two large canvases, one set above the other, one evoking the sky, the other Earth.  I wanted the two to remain separate because I enjoyed the idea of the two functioning as one piece and yet as separate.  I had been thinking about duality at the time, how the known and the unknown, the concrete and ethereal are eternally twinned and yet deeply divided from each other.  I might even say opposed to each other.  And I have to admit, as a human being living on earth I was feeling a bit of frustration at how oblivious nature (or heaven, the "other", the void, whatever you call it) can seem to our concerns.  Part of this thought was also inspired by a painting I had already finished.  It was a large rectangular piece containing nothing but clouds and blue sky.  I spent quite a bit of time on it but in the end, while I was struck by its expressiveness and its subjectivity, I was also struck by its apparent inhumanity.  It seemed empty and full at the same time.  I wanted more, a human element, something with which I could identify or channel myself through.  That was when I decided to rough in that second canvas below it, containing a man sitting by a broken-down boat on a field.  Perhaps by water.  I hadn't decided.  Anyway, I drew it up, worked out some compositional problems, and then went into sketeching the individual pieces in greater detail, always referring back to the thumbnail for composition.

Once I had reached a point where I felt I had enough of it realized, I drew a screen over my thumbnail and reproduced the thumbnail at a much larger scale.  I then got to work on filling in those details on the canvas...





At this point, I'm referring to lots of different photo references.  I prefer to use a variety, not just one, to help me patch together what I'm seeing in my head.  Straight reproduction annoys me but I do find gleaning fundamentals of proportion, texture, and shape from photo references are helpful in keeping me honest.  They're never a substitute for the real thing but oftentimes the real thing just ain't around.  Anyway, while I might call the live model the true star of any realist process, the imagination is ultimately the director, producer, and writer.  And so it was in this case.






Once I felt I had enough information to work with in paint, I put the finished cloud painting on top of this one and washed in some blue on the bottom half to match it.  



At this point, it's all improvisation and play.  I heard someone say once that, in painting, you have to build the stage before you can dance on it.  This is quite true in this case.  I had to build the canvas frame, stretch it, paint and sand about three layers of gesso on it, layout, sketch, compose, transfer, and finally lay in the base underpainting.  Finally, the spontaneity begins and I start to enjoy the unpredictability.  In this case, while I originally had thought the ground would lead down to a beach of sorts, I decided that a cliffside scene would do better.  I was delighted at how odd it might seem to have a boat at the top of a tall cliff, rather than at the bottom of it.  So I put in another cliff in the background to suggest that we were indeed fairly high above sea level.  I played around a bit with the colors in the foreground, keeping the contrast between ruddy earth tones and the greens and grays of the boat, unifying the two in the man sitting by the boat.  Here's the end result, which you can see a bigger shot of in my online gallery and personally at Cupcake Royale.








New Show at Cupcake Royale

If you happen to be in the Seattle area, please stop in to see my work at Cupcake Royale at the Alaska Junction in West Seattle.  A selection of new and old pieces will be on display there for the next two months so check it out and let me know what you think!