Over the weekend Sara and I were able to get keys to what will be home for at least the next two years. The apartment is basically the front half of a large Victorian home in the Avenues district of Salt Lake City. I am almost giddy about moving back into this particular neighborhood. We will be walking distance from the University of Utah, a handful of parks, some excellent preschool options for Asher, and Downtown.

The house itself has a great porch, plenty of space, the charming quirks that come with older homes several times retrofitted to suit the needs of their various owners, and a perfect space for my new studio. It will be a week or two before we actually move in (we have a little painting to do etc.) but yesterday I was able to get the new studio up and running, complete with a shiny new easel which has been sitting in a crate in my garage, taunting me since April.
And thanks to Sara’s new schedule, I spent several hours today breaking in both the new studio and the new easel, and was able to make some serious progress on the ‘Ledge’ painting.

I actually started working on the skirt last Friday, but didn’t get far enough along to warrant snapping any photos. By the end of today’s session, I was beginning to get a feel for the texture of the fabric and it’s slight translucence. Here’s a shot of the full canvas:

I love the new easel. It’s solid as a rock, ridiculously easy to adjust (seriously, it’s ridiculous) thanks to two electric motors and four foot pedals to control the height of the canvas and the tilt of the easel, and a smooth-as-glass caster system allowing the canvas to move side to side as well. It will easily hold as large a canvas as I am likely to fit in the room, and its easy on the eyes. It seemed a little indulgent at first (I’m used to painting on easels I built myself or the rickety student-grade type easels I described in the last post) but after painting on it today I’m completely sold, especially considering the number of hours I intend to stand in front of it over the next few years.

Here are a couple images of the new studio. I am never happy with photos of rooms. They never give any kind of sense of actual scale or proportion.

When I have a little time, I will put some more thought into the permanent arrangement, but so far this space is amazing. I have south and west light, well diffused by a few giant trees outside the house and the orientation of the room is such that my left arm (the one I usually paint with) doesn’t cast a shadow right where I’m working. I have enough space to keep two large paintings in the works plus enough extra for a possible student’s easel. I also really like the 1950’s school-room-esque maple floor. It’s no atelier, but it will certainly do for now.

When I first started painting, most days involved some degree of frustration with the medium.  It’s very different from using a pencil obviously.  These days that sort of frustration is pretty rare and is usually centered around some relatively minor disagreement with the paint (or more often, a change I make midway through painting such as the change of skirt color in ‘The Letter’).

On Wednesday I had a few hours to work on the little ‘Ledge’ painting and thought I would get the majority of the shirt finished.  I didn’t.  About an hour and a half into the session I stopped to evaluate my progress and, as happens occasionally, I realized it was, to put it lightly, sub-standard crap. A few of the defining wrinkles on the underside of the sleeve and the front of the shirt were off just enough to make it look like the shirt was digging into the model. This is a serious issue when the underlying structure is hard (a rib-cage or shoulder blade for example).  I’ve said it before, wrinkle placement is everything when painting drapery over anatomy.

It’s almost always easier to wipe off the new paint and start over than to make changes so I did. I was most careful along the edge of the arm, but did accidentally get a little paint on the adjacent clouds as I would discover later. Usually that would be the end of it. A few lost hours and a little clean-up. Not this time. While in the mid-moving limbo I am painting on a smallish, portable easel (I usually use it for very small paintings or to work on a secondary piece while my main easel is already in use). The important thing to know about this easel is that with a heavier canvas like this one, I have to tip the easel back farther than I normally would to keep my paint-strokes from setting up pendulum-like oscillations in the easel. The thing is also not quite heavy enough to be really stable with a canvas this size if I adjust it high enough to allow me to stand while painting. So I have to lean forward more than I am used to while working, and I have to sit.

Maybe twenty minutes into the re-painting, my foot slipped off the rung of my chair, and being off balance with my weight forward, I jammed a brush fully loaded with Titanium White right into the middle of the finished hair. In retrospect, I’m just glad it wasn’t the face. After a brief session of loudly reciting my entire vocabulary of expletives, I carefully wiped off the paint and set about re-touching the hair, a two hour debacle. So, four hours into the session, I had nothing accomplished except the significant raising of my blood pressure.

Now I was running out of time, so I re-touched a few areas that I was concerned would dry before I could revisit them, and finished the two undamaged areas of the shirt that I had blocked in: the left shoulder and the top-front of the right shoulder.

The final touch to the day came as I was cleaning up and gracefully set my entire forearm squarely in the middle of my pallet.

The only good thing about days like that is that they eventually end.

Yesterday I made up for the whole thing by successfully painting the entire shirt (and touching up the two areas of cloud damaged in the original wiping off of the paint, unnoticed in the ensuing ruined-hair panic).

In the end, it turned out splendidly, but I’ll never be able to look at this painting without reflexively checking my forearm for paint.

This 21st century version of apprenticeship requires no training, just collectors willing to buy a name on canvas…

Tale of the theatre director and a Damien Hirst painted by child, 2

The simplest of backgrounds seemed appropriate for the Ledge painting. I ended up going with a sort of Maxfield Parrish-esque sky and low clouds. A little shirt, skirt and a few flowers, and this painting will be finished.

This brings up a bit of news. Sara, Asher and I will be moving from Draper to the Avenues area of Salt Lake over the next few weeks. My studio will be the first room to re-locate. In theory, I will be painting in a new studio space by Monday of next week. Accordingly, updates to the sketchbook etc. may be temporarily delayed, but all for the best. As of July, I should be able to put in 30-50 hours a week of solid painting time (vs my current 5-15). Stay tuned for the latest.

Unbeknownst to Bryan, I do collect the little drawings I find lying around the house with the intent of one day combining them into a best-selling stream-of-consciousness children’s book.  Here are a few of my favorites.  Must get dull around the house after preschool, the library, the park, the pool, the errands, the sandbox, the children’s museum, visits with Grandma, etc, etc.  :)  Parenting is a tough job! Some days I am so glad to get back to my office.  I think spending a large portion of the day dealing with the ups-and-downs a three year old can muster is daunting.  Kudos to Bryan for doing it so gracefully.

Care to guess what the last drawing is of?  If you have kids I bet you know.

Yes, I was finally reunited with my estranged sketching materials yesterday evening.  There was, of course, the usual awkwardness at first.  Both of us perhaps a little too eager, the uncomfortable silences etc.  But soon enough it was just like old times.

The unusual lighting made this a fun little getting-reacquainted  exercise.  I believe Asher was playing in some sort of sandy puddle when I stealthily crept up and shot the photo, taking him completely by surprise.

I had an unexpected but welcome chance to hit the canvas for a few hours this afternoon and made good on my promise to give the feet what they had coming to them. Paint. I suppose, by now, no one is really surprised to see bare feet in a composition of mine.

I’ve always enjoyed painting feet, but, and I don’t mean to overplay this, this new technique takes it to an entirely new level. I’m not sold on the nail polish (in the painting, not on toenails in general) . One of these days I will remember to have my model take it off before the scrap shoot.

[audio:Chopin - Nocturne in E.mp3|autostart=no|bgcolor=0x000000]

And now, for your viewing pleasure, the finished concrete ledge.

Who wouldn’t want to sit there?  It’s lovely.  Besides, I hear the view will eventually be spectacular.

Yes, I realize this title sounds 10-15% hotter than the actual content below…but then, this is a ‘family’ blog.
As I mentioned yesterday, I had some time this afternoon to work on the new painting. I was able to finish the second arm and hand.

This sort of work is nearly the opposite of what I did yesterday with the concrete, at least in terms of attention to detail and necessity of reference material (and size of brushes used). Still, for entirely different reasons, it is an incredible pleasure. Much more of a challenge, and so much more rewarding. May I say again how much I love this new and improved flesh painting technique?

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to tackle the feet today. But their day will come. You heard me, feet.