This is a painting I recently completed. Right now it is hanging up in the CSU faculty show. I thought I would do a little post about the process of making this. Thanks to my colleague, Travis Dodd, for shooting the first and last photos in this post. It really makes a difference when a serious photographer shoots your artwork.
I briefly moved into a larger space at the school- it was unused for a few weeks in the summer. There is a gridded plan drawing taped to a drawing board on one easel. I placed the same grid onto the larger canvas with threads to transcribe it. This drawing process lets me precisely control the geometry and distortion in the image.
Once the ink drawing was finished I masked it off and laid down a heavy expressionist landscape of sorts. Peeling the masks off with this much wet paint is a strange and kind of fun step. I use tweezers and dissection tools to grab the masks without disturbing the paint. You can see here how wildly inconsistent the color is in my crummy cellphone photos.
I went with a duotone black on this one. Here the red layer has been applied. I think this was a mix of cadmium and perylene reds. There is a bit of rendering in this layer but I did not render the entire image. I was a little concerned that I might lose track of the details on the dome, so I put a decent amount of white onto that part.
The next application was a translucent green. If the mix is right the two tones will make a black that has some optical depth. When the painting is varnished that depth returns. The final painting step is white rendering. This piece is four feet wide- not enormous but the largest painting I've shown in recent years.
There is a lot of good work in the faculty show. Maybe you will have time to check it out.
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