Rainy Night

For all practical purposes the Steel Bridge work is finished.  I'm going to varnish it and then see if there are any loose ends.  It has been a wonderful four evenings with the temps dipping into the low 80's to 70's.  Tonight's rain really helped.  The humidity keeps the paint from drying so that I can blend larger expanses of paint at a time.  Most of my work was in detailed areas, but it still helped having a longer blending window.

Tomorrow night I will be working on the Fremont Bridge work.  I will be using the same mixture of black, grey and white graphic details.  This is a case where the one work informed the other work.

More Experimenting

I woke up Saturday morning from one of those vivid dreams where I was painting.  It was 2AM, so I went back to bed and was up and in the studio by 6:15.  I had this idea of using the high solid gel medium from Golden in combination with my cardboard 2.5" letter stencils using the alphabet repeatedly to create a relief on the canvas. From there I glazed dark grey then scumbled it back into the white range and repeated the process again until the areas looked just right.  The process just about obliterated the flourish background, which I decided was the right  move anyway.  It forced the bridge into the foreground and created a sky unlike any I've painted before. I chose the alphabet due to repetition and the fact I wanted to only play subconsciously with the physical existence of language without the meanings of words being imposed onto the subject matter.  I also felt it reminded me of learning to write in school.  We had the old yellowed pull down alphabet followed by the teacher's writings on the chalk board.


I proceeded to use a same technique on the other piece as well.  Both works have been asking for me to do something different while keeping a tight relationship to previous bridge and building works.  Yet both have a more traditional landscape feel to them with the elemental relationship between sky, land and water.  The heavy use of motif here felt out of place, yet the the lack of collage was like sending them out in the world in their undies.  This was the perfect solution and both works are now singing and are pretty much in the final stages.  They were just needing something to make them pop.

Figuring It Out

Innovation and problem solving are a big part of a painter’s life. Whenever I read about other artists it always seems that they're struggling with problems big and small and sometimes blow out of porportion.  If you don’t  have problems (the scientific definition of the word problem) you don’t have anything to resolve or figure out I guess.  Well, the proverbial problem is the upcoming summer with it’s 2% humidity and triple digit temperatures and my September exhibit I have to prepare for. As silly and trite as it may seem painting in the hottest month of the year in Arizona isn't going to be much fun.  I can deal with it by painting early mornings and nights physically, but the fact there's no humidity has my paint drying on the brush and in the pallet before it even reaches the canvas.  Acrylics dry fast as it is and I'll simply switch to oils like I used to, but the asthma isn't very easy to get past.  I admit I find the wonderful fragrance of the linseed and turpentine in the studio absolutely intoxicating.

My solution is switch to Golden’s Fluid Acrylics for the under painting to mid-layers.  New impasse - Golden doesn’t make the grey tones I work with.  So I'm attempting to mix my own using Fluid Acrylic medium.  It’s a fairly good solution.  The opacity isn’t quite there, but it’s workable while I work to find an even better solution.  I might even have to purchase pure pigments and disperse water to mix my own paint from scratch.

The strategy it’s self produces a very graphic look and is actually very fast and makes me simplify elements.  It’s a keeper, so I may even use this when it’s not seasonally required. 

Work continues on the commission.  Tonight I just spent hours looking and thinking.  I have a number of things to figure out in regards to how much of the motif I want to show through or if I will strike it out entirely with another pallet knife painting session.  Will I add to the collage or will I just keep expressively painting and let paint carry the day alone.  It's almost midnight, so I'll sleep on it and see what the morning brings.

Summer has arrived...

The paintings of the commission are coming together quickly now.  Same amount of hours being spent, but they're moving faster nonetheless.


I have a feeling that the Steel Bridge work will be the first one completed even though it was the last one started.  I've been working hard to balance the collaged motif with the painterly sky.  Around Midday  I pretty much obliterated the painterly dark sky I'd painted with a pallet knife loaded with white, titan white and light grey.  The textures created are wonderful and don't have the look I generally see as the result of knife painting.  I guess that's why I so rarely utilize the technique.  Every once in a while I have a moment of inspiration and do something I hadn't done before.  I was just really hungry for the physicality of paint on the surface as much as I like my smooth blended skies I just wanted something more brutal.  I am softening it up just a bit, but the mass and textures will remain.


These two bridges are dramatically different.  The Steel Bridge feels like two rusty towers that jet up into the sky like monuments of a bygone era, while the Fremont spans the water with all the grace of a spider tracing it's web.  The constant is the sky and how these works are tied together.


With it hitting triple digits in the studio; summer has arrived. I purchased a portable evaporative cooler. I'm having buyer's remorse.  It just turned the studio into a sauna. I will give it a try again not waiting until it's hot in there to give it a go.  I may just have to work early in the mornings and at night, no big deal really.  Until the commission is finished I will be braving the blunt of the heat.  My goal is to have the commission finished within the next two weeks considering how fast the Steel is going.

The 2nd Piece

The 2nd piece of the commission is well on it's way.  From this point forward I will be bouncing back and forth between the two works.  I'm also working on titles for both works.  The Fremont Bridge work's sky is becoming a key focus of mine.  I've noticed that the emphasis on the sky of the Fremont is influencing the Steel Bridge work.  I think the dialog between the two works is really interesting.  They're definitely siblings.


My nightly stint working in the studio has been uninterrupted the way I like it;  thankfully.


This weekend my goal is to get as far as I can on the Steel and try to finish or at least be only a stone's throw from finishing the Fremont.  That's the goal, but I'm not going to rush anything. I'm just going to hit the coffee really hard and try to get things finished up.  These large works swallow hours up like they're minutes.


I'm going to start getting ready for my September showing once the commission is shored up. My San Francisco photos are going to be the driving force behind this show.  I'm going to have a lot of nighttime works.  It will be fun in the since that I will be using a colour pallet that is driven by the neon signs and the yellow glow of street lamps of nighttime streets.  I will have plenty of daytime paintings as well.

Daylight

Waited for daylight to show the progress. I don't feel the light has been right in the studio at night for accurate photos.  Spent time working in the details of the bridge and more glazing into the sky.  Today will be a busy day.  I'm working out the final sketch for the Steel Bridge piece and will start that today.  


Unfortunately, I'm going to have to spend some time refurbishing my gate replacing the 2x4s with 2x6s, changing out the slats and the locking mechanism for a more heavy duty slide bolt.  Two weeks ago someone kicked it in, but didn't take anything in the yard. I figured it was just a drunk with anger issues or teenager having fun.  I repaired it and wedged a concrete block at it's base for extra security and thought that it was just a fluke.  Tuesday night while I was out in the studio working late someone attempted to break through the gate again.  I grabbed a hammer and stepped out of the studio door yelling "Who's out there!!!!"  Shortly after I heard running and the dogs barking at them two doors down.


It has unnerved me a bit.  I have a tendency to work late at night into the early morning hours.  It's when I'm the most creative and have a tendency to perform three hours work per hour when I break into the grove.  Painting is a lot like surfing in that respect. The last thing I want is to contend with an unwanted visitor or the fear of one.  I've worked out on the patio for years without issue, so hopefully this is just a passing phase due to bad economic times.

Layers

The commission has thrown it's share of curve balls at me. I kept on looking at the bridge as I collaged and reworked the sky and the perspective just looked off. It has taken hours of working and reworking, but I'm finally comfortable with the perspective.  I hate the delay, but I hate the idea of letting a work with a faulty perspective leaving the studio a good deal more.  Now the piece is about midway through where I'm adding artifacts and then obscuring them and then adding more.  Building the textures layer by layer and varnishing between layers to create the luminosity.

The sky is becoming a very important factor in this painting and it's a little more painterly than I usually get.  I've had this concept of a dark stormy sky as the backdrop to the bridge in my mind. An uncanny liken to a seen photograph burned into my mind actually.  I thought it was a photo I saw on the web while performing the visual research for the painting, but I've come to the conclusion the photo of the bridge wasn't something I'd seen in waking, but rather while dreaming.  This after a couple of hours of trying to find it again and only seeing photos like it, but not it. I do that often.  Many times in my sleep I will see a painting or the subject matter as clear as a photograph and the memory is so vivid that I believe it was actually seen during my waking hours.  Well the sky isn't perfect yet, but I'll nail it down this weekend. In fact I should be in the glazing stage of the painting this weekend, so I'll be starting the second piece of the Steel Bridge tomorrow night.  I plan for this to be the final rendition of the Steel Bridge.  I've painted it now three times and this will be the fourth.  I believe 6 Days while being a great piece begot this one.  I haven't decided if I'm going to bring the yellow sky back into it.  I'm feeling a bit film noir at the moment and digging the dark grayscale vibe.  I may have to pop in a Hitchcock film in this weekend.

Studio Update:

I've fully moved out of the old studio and have been working on the new studio while working on the commission.  My Brother-in-law and I built my painting rack/loft (4 x 15' approx), which freed up a lot of space in the studio and eliminated even more clutter.  I'm getting to where I don't work well creatively with clutter, so figuring out where things go and keeping the studio clean is imperative to being able to create. The neat freaks of my past would rejoice if they were here now. My studios in the past have imitated Francis Bacon to a watered down extent.  Now it's as spartan as Jasper John's studio.  Maybe it was always a size issue.

The painting rack is really beautiful in of itself.  I lucked out that my brother-in-law is a lot stronger than me, because the two layer 2"x8"x15' beams with the boards joined by carriage bolts weighed a ton.  He had the muscle to put them in their joist hangers with me supporting their weight on the opposite side. It was good too to have another brain to figure out the construction specifics as well.

Along with building the painting rack I purchased and constructed a shelf from Ikea to hold my paint jars and a cart for my collage materials.  I think that will be it for the projects for the moment.  Need a small reprieve from construction projects and some time just painting.