BlogTV Art Stunt: Day 10

I worked a lot today, and decided this painting is finished. This painting is pretty dark, and relies on a lot of transparent effects that won’t be visible at this resolution. Oh my aching back, it takes a lot of work to pull all those staples around the edge and clean up the masking tape. But it’s worth it. I never quite know how a painting is going to look when I clean up the edges, but I think this one turned out pretty much how I intended. I’ll try to get a larger image up on the web somehow.

BlogTV Art Stunt: Day 9

OK, I goofed off yesterday, and didn’t get any painting done so this is still just Day 9. I spent a lot of time yesterday thinking about how the project is going. It is rather dismaying to see all this technological apparatus being used on such a small audience. I suspect this experiment has gone astray somehow, but at least I’m gathering some info on how to make it work. I think I’m working in the wrong medium, when I work in oil paint I’ll work for hours, but with tempera, I can only work for a few minutes and then everything gets wet and I have to stop. I suspect that people would be more interested in actually seeing an artist at work, so perhaps I should schedule a specific time each day so people could check in and watch. Or perhaps another approach is needed. The video stream is insufficient to see just what I’m painting, and that’s not going to change how I paint. Perhaps I need a high-rez webcam, just showing a still image every hour or so, to see more detail and allow viewers to see what is changing in the painting.

But I suspect there is a more fatal flaw in this experiment. Watching an artist paint is sort of like watching someone do menial work, it’s boring. It’s dirty and messy, and hard work over the long haul. The public only sees the end result, an attractive image, but they don’t have any understanding of the days of work and thought behind an image. I guess if people are bored by watching me paint, then the experiment has found its message. Real painting isn’t like watching Picasso or Pollock doing a staged performace for the camera, with all the boring parts edited out. This is live, and real. Follow the experiment over time and see what happens.

BlogTV Art Stunt: Day 8

I have been mostly working in the evenings, sometimes quite late at night, so please keep checking in to see progress on the painting. It’s at a slow part, and I have to work carefully. Tempera paint is tricky to work with in color, the underpainting dissolves and “drags up” into the new paint. It’s easy to work with when the painting is thin, but not so easy when it gets built up. This is always the problem with gouache and opaque water pigments.

BlogTV Art Stunt: Day 7

I’m continuing to work with the color tempera, it has some interesting properties. Lately I’ve been thinking about one of Leonardo daVinci’s painting lessons. He described how to build the structure of foliage and trees by laying down layers of bright and dark. I’ve used that lesson a lot in abstract painting, my work sometimes deals with fields of color putting “visual pressure” forward or backwards. My work isn’t about trees or foliage, but I tend to work in blue-green colors so people always assume that it is. But it’s not. Anyway, this painting is still in the underpainting stage, far less than halfway to being anything. I like the color tempera, and this size of paper works pretty well for me, but I have to mix huge amounts of pigments. Color mixing is working pretty well, better than I expected. I bought a nice Italian signpainter’s brush, it was cheap, and works great at this scale.

Flood

I haven’t been able to paint much due to a huge disaster. A pipe burst, flooding much of my basement with an inch of water. It reminds me of one of my favorite jokes.

Two businessmen are flying to Tahiti, sitting next to each other in First Class. One of them complains to the other, “my factory was completely destroyed by a fire, but I had tons of insurance and it paid for everything, with enough left over for a nice vacation in Tahiti.” The other businessman says, “that’s almost exactly what happened to me, except my factory got wiped out in a flood.” The first businessman says, “Hey, that’s amazing, how do you start a flood?”

BlogTV Art Stunt: Day 5

To my surprise, I decided this painting was finished, so I took the tape off the edges and unmounted it. It looks pretty good. I decided it was too boring for viewers to watch me paint in black and white, and I was getting bored too. But I thought it turned out pretty good. And I decided to give the equipment a rest. It’s 11PM and it’s 90 degrees outside, it’s going to be even hotter tomorrow, time to conserve some energy and let the equipment rest a day or so. I’ll start a new painting Monday. In the meantime, I laid the painting right on the scanner, so I can show you an actual-size detail, you can see a tiny bit of what I’m up to. I’ll try to get a digital camera or something, to show the whole image.

detail

BlogTV Art Stunt: Day 4

I’m back at work. I’ve been leaving the video zoomed in so you can see the detail, but it’s still too blurry to see what I’m really doing. I’ll see if I can get some hirez scans when the work is done, so you can see the final result. I looked at the detail video, it looks like black and white video, but that’s because I’m working in black and white. Working in B/W is harder than working in color, and not nearly as much fun. Color can be a crutch sometimes, you can distract people from the problems in your painting with colors. But in B/W, all the flaws are just as distinct as the good bits, so you have to fix things or it all falls apart. I went to the art store and looked at some colored tempera, but they were out of stock on important primary colors, so there would be no way to mix colors properly. I could use acrylics, but I hate using acrylics, if I go to that trouble, I might as well work in oil.

BlogTV Live: Art Stunt Day 3

The first time I looked at the painting today, I liked it a lot more than when I was painting on it last night. It looks a lot brighter, I was working more in midtones, with a looser, wetter brushwork in spontaneously mixed greys. It’s progressing well, but still a long way to go.

Lately I have a bit of pain in my right arm from tendonitis, and it’s painful to paint. I’ve been hauling big buckets of water from my sink to my garden, I had to start lifting the buckets with my left arm because it hurt too much. I wonder how much 5 gal of water weighs? I took some Alleve which is good for deep tendon pain, it should kick in soon and I’ll start painting.

I think I’ll go down to the art supplies store about 4PM today and get some new brushes. The ones I’m using are too small for this size of paper, and not enough variation in size. I have some huge brushes but they’re too big. Hmm.. Maybe I should just buy bigger paper, that would be a lot cheaper. I’d rather work larger. For that matter, I’d rather be working on more than one piece at once, so I could continue to paint on one while the other dried. I prepared a couple of boards like this so I could switch to another board. But I just don’t have enough space to do it. It reminds me of an old story I heard about Basquiat. He’d work on one painting at a time, focusing on that until he was finished. Then he hired an assistant, who saw him working. He told Basquiat that everyone works on multiple works at the same time, and his job as assistant was to prep canvases and move stuff around so he could do that. Suddenly Basquiat’s output exploded, and his works started referring to each other in a wonderful way.


7:10PM – I bought some new brushes, boy is it expensive to buy wide soft bristle brushes. I’ll work in the studio more tonight, so stay tuned. You’re invited to open the stream and just leave it running. I figure people actually want to see me paint, so I’ll leave a monitor running, and if anyone is connected, I’ll make an effort to paint. But the stream monitor only updates once a minute, so you’ll have to stay connected for over a minute before I could possibly notice it.

© Copyright 2016 Charles Eicher