Home-Cooked Gesso

The messy studio - a far cry from the "gallery look" of last weekend!

I've finally decided it's time to bite the bullet and become a painter who preps my own supports.

"Support" is the general term for what an oil painting is painted onto, either a wooden panel or stretched canvas. I prefer wood panels to stretched canvas because the surface is smoother and more rigid.

Previously I have mainly used factory-gessoed wood panels, like GessoBoard. Gesso is the chalky white paint that is layered on a canvas or wood panel before you start an oil painting. But I've decided that if I'm going to spend 60 hours on a painting, I may as well spend a couple hours preparing the surface.

So being an all-or-nothing type, I dove in and spent 3 solid days layering 19 panels with 2 layers of rabbit skin glue and 5-6 coats of homemade gesso, sanding between each layer. My right deltoid muscle aches to say the least.

I used traditional gesso materials from Sinopia (glue crystals, chalk, and white pigment) and combined them using their traditional gesso recipe. For the wood panels I used ArtBoards of all sizes, rectangles and squares from 6 x 6 inches up to 18 x 24 inches.

I bought a single burner hotplate for using in my studio, and improvised a double boiler by nesting two old cooking pots together - two pots that won't ever be used for food again.

First I soaked the rabbit skin glue crystals in water overnight, which made a transparent, gelatenous gray lumpy mixture. Then I put the mixture into my double boiler, and when it warmed up it got clearer, runnier, and became a thin, watery glue. It spread really easily onto my wood panels with a housepainting brush, but immediately began to sink in to the wood and dried almost instantly.

Re-reading the directions, I found out I had to do TWO coats of the glue. It wasn't too horrible, and I have a good ventilation system in my studio, but there was definitely a distinctly funky odor. I don't know exactly how they make rabbit skin glue, but I imagine vegetarian painters don't use it.

Once the panels were sealed with the glue, I mixed together the chalk, white pigment, and remaining glue mixture and warmed it to make the gesso. It made a watery, not very paint-like liquid, so I had to play around with the proportions a bit. But I found it works best if it's slightly more watery than housepaint, so you can paint thin layers.

This was how I stacked them to dry, "good side" leaning down to avoid dust, but careful not to let the front surface touch anything. I got pretty good at perfecting a sort stable mutual leaning system. Every time I added a layer of gesso to a panel, I had to lean it up to dry, and by the time the last was painted the first was ready to be sanded, so I had to rotate them around quite a bit.

The sanding was the most tedious part, and my arm began to really ache. The second and third day I tried to use my left hand as much as my right to sand, so now both my arm ache.

Anyway, the project was a success - I now have 19 beautiful panels with a silky/chalky/smooth surface, plus a dozen teeny tiny panels that were just laying around the studio, for little oil sketches. Hopefully I won't have to do this again for a long time!

Michael Grimaldi Drawing Workshop

Melissa
graphite pencil on paper
about 20 x 16 inches

This is the main drawing I did over the last two weeks in Michael Grimaldi's drawing workshop at BACAA. It was drawn over about 8, three-hour sessions. (It's interesting to compare this drawing to my first BACCA workshop drawing I did of Melissa in March 2006)

detail

We started the drawings with a 2-dimensional, stright-line block in that I have described many times on this blog, for example: here, here, and here.

After solving the basic proportions and refining the block-in, we moved into seeing the forms as three-dimensional blocks in perspective.

To construct the major masses of the head, torso and pelvis, we identified bony projections and median lines to describe the roll, pitch, and yaw position of each shape.

I've roughly diagrammed a few of these with the red lines in the picture above. The points where lines intersect are determined by bony projections and places where the flesh attaches to the underlying bony structures. We look for indications of these on the surface of the skin, and build a concept of the box construction of each form: showing the perspective to identify tilt, position and distance.

Here are some of my notes from what Michael said in class:

Gesture, Proportion, Perspective
All three are inseparable, any error in one creates a series of problems in your drawing.

All the answers are within the drawing.

We need to find the points on the body that yield the most information about perspective possible. These are the distant outside bony projections.

This pattern of points starts having a profound meaning about the subject's three-dimensionality.

Let the drawing inform what your next decision will be.

Make a three dimensional drawing without relying on value - the plotting of points and median line tells you what the perspective is doing.

Look for the constructive anatomy and the perspective as a foundation for the drawing.

Anticipate without inventing: Hone the ability to see your environment through knowledge.

Drawing is like diffusing a bomb, all the concepts are a form of deconstructing and reverse-engineering.

There are two extremes, monotony versus mayhem. Our goal is to find a balance between the two.

Composition is the "composite", the entire experience of the image, from design to texture to paper to size, everything that affects the view's experience of the image.

Cut of the light - the angle of the shadow is perpendicular to the light

The image above is a detail of the small value study I did in the upper right corner of my drawing, about 3 x 6 inches. Michael encouraged us to make small tonal studies before moving forward with making a full tonal drawing. This really helped solve a lot of the major tonal decisions - otherwise it's too easy to mix light and shadow and make inadvertent holes or protrusions.

The lower part of my drawing shows how I blocked the terminators - delineating where the light slips over the horizon of the form. These terminators seem much softer in life, but there is a distinct moment where the shadow ends/terminates and the light begins.

To find the terminators, which can be confusing when seeing light slide over a complicated form, Michael encourages us to find "the cut of the light" - the angle of the line perpendicular to the direction of the light source. I've diagrammed some of that here:


I also wrote down the artists and films Michael referred to in his lectures this week, here's the list and links to the best resource I could find about each (in no particular order):

Artists/Paintings/Art Movements
Brunelleschi - created/discovered our current understanding of perspective
Harold Speed
Munich School
Ashcan School
Antonio Lopez Garcia - Dream of Light
Vicent Disiderio
Neue Gallery, NY
Reubens - Rape of the Sabines
George Bellows - Use of the Golden Section
Gericault - Raft of the Medusa
Balthus
Chardin
Walter Murch
Damien Hirst
Wim Delvoye
Tim Hawkinson
Neo Rausch
Marlborough Gallery
Betty Parsons

Films
Michael references films constantly so I asked him to name some of his all-time favorite ones. This is his list, in no particular order and off the top of his head while we were talking:

The Conversation
Memento
The Lives of Others
Miller's Crossing
The French Connection
Blade Runner
Collateral
The Third Man
Kurosawa Eloru and Stray Dog

If you are interested in studying with Michael, who is a fabulous teacher, please visit Bay Area Classical Artist Atelier. He also has started his own school along with Kate Lehman and Dan Thompson: Janus Collaborative School of Art in New York.

NOTE: As Usual, My Caveat
Everything I post on my blog is my own highly subjective and filtered interpretation of my studies. My notes don't necessarily accurately reflect the teachings of my instructors, in fact my teachers may disagree or find some of my expression of their ideas to be inaccurate. The best way to understand their teaching is to buy their books and take their classes.

Blog Mentions

In addition to the writeup on the Haight Ashbury Beat, I was also pictured and listed on Emma Krasov's art review blog, "Art and Entertain Me".

Thanks, Jeremy and Emma!

Open Studios 2008 Recap

Thanks to everyone who stopped by, and especially those who bought artwork, my open studio weekend was a huge success! I sold 28 artworks, had 126 people sign my guest book, and I estimate over 400 people toured my studio - sometimes standing in line to wait because my little space was so crowded. It was wonderful to talk to neighbors and art lovers all day and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

I'm also thrilled to have already been written up on the Haight Ashbury Beat blog - scroll down the page and you'll see one of my gold-leaf-goddess collages with a nice description.

So, my blog is officially 2 years old, and it's made me very introspective about the last 24 months of my life as an artist. Two years ago I had not yet discovered the classical realism movement and the contemporary masters who would become such a huge inspiration to me. Two years ago I was mourning all the years I had been away from painting. Two years ago I was facing my biggest fears about returning to it.

Now, two years later, I am completing my 24th week of intensive, full time training under some of the most important living masters teaching today, through classes at BACCA, Gage Academy, and Studio Escalier. My studio work has begun to take shape and with the recent still life paintings this summer I've found a direction I want to persue for a series. I'm starting to feel the ticklings of recognition, and also a pull to teach.

I'm finding that with dogged pursuit, momentum grows.

Who Does She Think She Is (the movie)

Watch this movie trailer, looks like an amazing film about women artists and motherhood.

Juror's Choice Award

Tonight I walked into the Preview Gala for the San Francisco Open Studios Exhibition, and there was a big ribbon tacked next to my painting - turns out my painting received a Juror's Choice Award!

See previous posts about this painting here

My studio is open next weekend, October 11 & 12, more info at www.artspan.org, please stop by!

And Now for Something Completely Different: Collage!

Wow, I had so much fun....

I used to do a lot of collage (before I got back into painting) and I have boxes of cool vintage-y stuff I never got around to using.

After a month of having the flu, setting up my space for Open Studio, and attempting a new painting that completely flopped, I decided to have some fun and haul out my stash of goddesses, divas, and french postcards...


This is just sneak preview of some layouts I'm playing around with, had fun photographing them with my new camera lens - shallow depth of field is yummy!!

Next step is to lacquer everything down with layers of gold leaf, sepia stain, tissue papers and varnish... it's so fun to get back to my little collages! Stay tuned for scans of the final images - all of which will be framed and for sale at my Open Studio October 11/12!

In other news, I decided last-minute to sign up for Michael Grimaldi's drawing class starting in just a few days. I'm so excited because I thought I wouldn't be able to do it, but in the end the scheduling came together.

Finally, a reminder my studio will be open as part of the official San Francisco Artspan Open Studios October 11 & 12, 11am-6pm both days. I also submitted my most recent oil painting, Wax Paper and Ribbon to the open studios artists group exhibition. There are opening events for that show this weekend October 4/5 and I'll be at both events, hope to see you there!