February's Studio Update:
CANVAS AFTER CANVAS
February 7, 2006 - With a hand written calendar hanging over my palette, I'm never able to forget just how much time I have left before my next big show in April. While I'm a bit stressed and already having nightmares about having enough work finished, this month has been highly productive, as I'm now engaged with 16 canvases, or just about half of the entire show.Ways to tell I'm in full work mode again:
- Regular visits to Casino El Camino dwindle to once every couple of weeks
- I can feel my stomach shrink as I go back to one meal a day - at evening to keep my metabolism down
- 4:00 am is bedtime, 9:34 am my alarm goes off.
- I'm often lost in my own thoughts even in the middle of conversations
- Rants against cell phones, pop culture and TV and movies increase 225%
- My girlfriend complains that I don't spend enough time with her
It's pretty much a life I'm accustomed to and feel very comfortable with. The deadly quiet at 3 am, the crisp cool air and the canvases staring back to me provide a quiet relief from the daily stress and trivial problems that fill out the rest of the days.
As stressed out and overworked as I already am, I can at least thank some magical white powder for speeding up my painting process a good 20-30 percent. Of course, I'm talking about the marble dust I've added to the rabbit skin glue as I've prepared my canvases. I'm still amazed at how much I love using it, and how much it radically affects the drying time of the oils, my style, paint application and confidence at all once. I'm not sure I'll ever stretch and prime another canvas without using it again.
And so this month I've been stretching my legs on the smaller canvases, still experimenting with my pallete, but felt it was time to start in on four of the workhorses of the show - my new format, 40" x 50" canvases. I spent a few hours one night working on some charcoal sketches that haven't really got me anywhere but got me thinking about space and compositions for multiple figure paintings.
The themes and overall vision of the show are all developing, and as the progress unfolds on the large canvases, shown below, I'll re-visit the smaller canvases and then hopefully have a comprehensive show of thirty paintings hanging at Bolm Studios in April. |
Charcoal sketches
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