The First Day of Painting

I started on the first day on the armored leggings, boldly putting in some strong blacks. In the past I've snuck up on real dark darks, layering watery layers, but life is too short, and so what I know will end up black I just made black. I'm painting this in grisaille, all in shades of gray, so I'm defining the form with dark grays where the form is in shadow and light grays, leading to white, where the form is in light. The armor, dark and reflective, is all about the extremes of light and dark, and it was fun to establish those early on. And I liked setting her on the ground as a beginning.

I'm layering the paint thinned purely with water. I use to love using Golden's matte medium for creating transparent washes, but I've come to feel it's seductive surface is not as controllable.

You can see a glimpse of my studio in the background. The Met Museum bag hanging on the closet doorknob has my tax-related receipts in it. Just so you know my filing system.

Transferring the Drawing

Availing myself of more modern technology, I blew up my scanned compositional drawing and had it printed out full size. I then transferred it to the panel using a technique that I think was very successful: I vigorously rubbed the back of the full-size print with sienna pigment, another inherently beautiful material: pure powdered Siennese dirt bought years ago in Italy (a honeymoon present from my wife). Then I taped the drawing to the gessoed panel and, with a 2H pencil, carefully traced over the drawing, pressing the pigment onto the panel. This proved to be wonderfully responsive, leaving light lines when I pressed lightly and solid lines when I pressed harder. And it was only slightly messy. The color of the pigment, being close to the background color, looked very nice on the panel. A few places required some firming up of the line with a brown colored pencil, but the transfer process for the most part left a very vibrant drawing behind - so often tracing and transferring leaves behind a dead, inert bunch of lines.

The Panel

I gessoed and sanded and gessoed and sanded the panel, all very slowly and deliberately, like an apprentice in a Renaissance shop - and then I actually read the directions that came with the big jar of gesso I had ordered from Art-Boards. They suggested using a sponge brush to apply thin, thin layers of gesso, with light sandings in between. This proved to be much better than the relatively brutal coats I was slathering on, and then sanding for hours. And then to sand the initial coats I had the inspiration to use a Black and Decker Mouse Sander, and my preparation time went from 3 days to 2 hours. I wish I could go back in time and give Renaissance painting apprentices sponge brushes and Mouse Sanders. And iPods.

Once the panel was smooth as only sanded gesso can be, after about 7 coats, I painted it with a nice toned back ground, a few loose coats with a big brush of a very watery sienna and burnt sienna Golden™ acrylic, with a little Payne's Grey to pull back the

orange color.

The panel looked very beautiful when it was just the many coats of sanded gesso, and now especially beautiful covered with several transparent washes of the acrylic. As always, I wondered if my process was about taking inherently beautiful materials and turning them into awkward compositions. But banish doubts! We are charging forward.

Laying it out

I spent a fair bit of time working out the size and shape of the paintings I wanted to do. I always have worked on small paintings that could practically fit into your pocket, and I wanted these to be larger, similar in size to altar paintings, and I wanted the panels to have an interesting shape. And I wanted them to be panels: I didn't want the weave of canvas to be part of the texture of the paintings.

Searching around, I contacted Art-Boards, here in Brooklyn, mainly because they make the most beautiful panel gesso you'll ever find, and I ordered 12 panels, 32" high and 16" high, with a nice curved top. I ordered these without a thought of how I might eventually frame them, but that, I'm still just assuming, will sort itself out.

Chris came over to my studio and posed, holding a yard stick in place of a sword, as she had envisioned something on the order of a Joan of Arc pose. I then did a quarter-scale sketch of the composition based on my charcoal drawing of Chris.

I was now two weeks into my project. Sketches on my easel and panels stacked against the wall, waiting to be gessoed and sanded.

First Sketch

I emailed Chris and asked if she was interested. As she was, I asked her to think of some significant objects, attributes, and icons to put in her painting. She came back to me with a list of about 40 objects to surround her in the painting. I don't know what most of them mean at all, yet I set about working on the composition.

Inceptive Idea

I was sitting in a day-long meeting in Shanghai, of all places, my mind whirling without discipline through my sketch book. I thought of doing a series of paintings of friends in the form of saints' portraits, like the pictures in books in my long-distant Catholic upbringing: men and women surrounded by their attributes and icons, sometimes with the instruments of their martyrdom still embedded in their heads. St. Jerome, for instance, always with his books, his red robes, and a placid lion.

Or St. Lucy, strangely proud of her gouged out eyes on a plate, her 'spiritual' eyes restored to her.

What would be the icons and attributes of my very secular friends? I made an initial list of people to paint, and a quick sketch of my friend Chris as an idea.