I think it’s fair to say that it’s been quite a while since I last posted an update (four months, in fact — since March). I’m going to lay a hunk of blame on the month of World Cup (women’s edition)*. I’ve been a women’s sports fan since a little prior to the 1968 Olympic Summer Games in Mexico City. Through most of the 80s I was a sports photographer specializing mostly with women’s sports — which resulted in me also being a women’s sports activist as I was trying to get those photos sold as well as trying to get press for deserving, if largely ignored, sports and athletes. So…when a major tournament like the World Cup presents itself — especially when the games are available to view — I’m going to be distracted and my workflow will be disrupted. As the United States Women’s National Team #USWNT won the whole enchilada (mmm….enchilada (stacked, not rolled)), I consider it time well-spent.
Springtime and early-summer chores and some sundry dental silliness have also taken a bite out of my usual schedule. C’est la vie. So, all of that out of the way….
We left off with my having completed View From the Stone Doorway. I then started some practice/experiments with canvas stretching and gessoing said canvases. I’m not a stranger to either activity, but I wanted add to my knowledge and maybe see if I could have some improvement on my established techniques. Also, since I need to stretch a custom canvas to fit a mis-sized frame I got sent, I wanted to get comfortable with stretching canvas again — it’s been a few years.
After peppering the stretcher bars with several rounds of tacks — enough so that doing it again was going to be problematic, I gessoed. A lot. This canvas ended up with a silly amount of layers when all was said and done. But now I had this canvas just sitting there. Seemed a shame not to splatter some paint on it in an artful manner. The canvas itself is small-ish and not one of the mainstream sizes. I wanted to match the aspect ratio of current HD TVs, so I used 16″ and 9″ stretcher bars. This left me with a longer than usual canvas — just the sort of thing that was asking for a similarly long subject. I turned to one of my favorites: the sexiest rocket (er…missile, actually) yet made, the Saturn V. I chose one of my favorite NASA photos and chose to interpret it using painting knives. It was a lot of fun.
That is to say that it was a lot of fun until it came to photographing it. You see, the painting, Apollo 4 with Moon, has a noticeable texture which, when combined with gloss varnish, doesn’t lend itself to problem-free photography. Round after round I ended up with glare and specular highlights so profound that they couldn’t be fixed no matter how much Photoshop I threw at them. When I finally cobbled together the things I needed to both polarize and filter an ad hoc lighting setup, I finally solved my very vexing issues.
Needless to say, I’m going to have to design and invest in a new lighting setup for future in-house art photography. I’m not going through that mishigas again.
Since then, I’ve been updating online stuff with the new offerings. I’ve also returned to a long neglected painting, Stolen Moment. I started this in 2008 and it was meant to be a purely airbrushed painting. I’ve mentioned in the past my woes with my airbrush area not being climate controlled, and this was about the time when I decided to shift over to using a hairy stick, instead, for the majority of my art.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t painted anything significant with brush and acrylics since moving to the New Mexico high desert. The paints dried out so much faster than they had when I was in a more humid, closer to sea level environment. I managed to slap on an underpainting, but decided that until I got a handle on how to use the materials in this location, it would be best if I just tucked the painting away until I could do it to my satisfaction. Then other works and life events happened. So, after years tucked away in a box, it’s now sitting proud on my easel.
My plan is to retain the background elements as airbrushed. In fact, I airbrushed in some missing areas before starting on the main subject. My only real issue is dealing with the paint not adhering like I’ve gotten used to. The support is clayboard, and I’ve been painting on gessoboard and gessoed canvases for the past several years. It’s not a disaster or anything, but it does require a slight change in technique.
So, this is what I’m going to be working on for a while. at 73.5 x 58 cm (29 x 22-7/8 in), it’s bigger than what I’ve been doing recently. Still, a lot of it is pretty darned straightforward, so I’m hoping it goes relatively quickly.
* Until they call the men’s edition the “Men’s World Cup”, I’m not inclined to also qualify the women’s edition. For the foreseeable future, to me they are both World Cup.
