Friday, February 10, 2017

Post 43: Where am I?

  Well, the pigments, pastels and wax background for "Mugshots" is almost finished:



   The small test I made with the nudes printed on Japanese paper showed the potential problems:


     1. The medium tends to create a certain amount of cloudiness in the dark tones and mute the contrast, so details get lost. I should increase the contrast in the final prints.
     2. When trying to scrape the layer of medium as thin as possible over the image, it is very easy to damage it, especially around the edges, which tend to curl up when fusing. I will have to press the paper down into the wax by warming the background and using a brayer, brush medium over, and burnish the edges down so they are buried deeper in the wax than the center of the image. 

    Now, as far as "Trompe l'Oeil Window" is concerned, I did the baseboard and the window frame(including the inside edge, incorporated the Green Envelope(I had to darken and detail the trompe l'oeil shadow with pastels), the Bug, and the Key on top. There is still some milkiness on the Window Frame, so more wax will need to be scraped off, but carefully, as it is easy to scrape back to the white gesso. I messed up the Nude Black and White Photograph(milkiness and white scrapes, and am considering cutting out a second window and mounting the Photograph behind thin acetate.
   It somehow seems to me now that there are not enough Photograpic Elements to the painting, and that I could add a little complexity. Of course, the Hanging Light Bulb is missing, but still, the Window looks dull. I had a sudden idea, and tried to place some actual objects on the botton ledge of the window, the usual culprits of course, my trademark symbols: a Domino leaning against a Small Red Ball, and a Dice. It works, and brings life to the painting!


   So I believe the pieces are going to end up even more Mixed Media than I thought... The only downside is that the real objects tend to lessen the trompe l'oeil effect of the incorporated photographs, and I may have to somehow subdue them with matte spray.

Post 42: Gonna have to unplug from the Internet to get back to Painting!

    I just noticed it had been almost 2 weeks since my last post. Trump has turned my fairly organized life upside down, and I have done very little since inauguration but bitch, read articles, post on Facebook, answer posts, answer answers to Posts, and rack my brain, first to understand what had happened and why, then understand what was about to happen, then watch it happen like clockwork, then reading everything and everybody in the field of Socio Political Science to try and figure out what to do. I have been obsessed and relentless, and am not sure at all it has done any good at all.
   I need to reclaim my sanity, and get back to work, so except for an hour or 2 a day, starting to morrow, I am pulling the plug on the Internet.
   I have done a little work, but at most a couple hours a day on average. This situation has to change.