Now that I have done a week of every-day landscape oil paintings, it’s worth noting a few things:

First, I feel really exposed doing this. I’ve never painted like this before in my life, and frankly, I’m not that good at it. There have been a couple of decent paintings this week. But there have also been paintings like yesterday’s. Yikes. However, I’ll keep posting as long as I keep painting them — this is, after all, my “digital open studio”. As tempting as it is to edit out the lousy ones, I just don’t think that would be right. Sorry, friends, you are going to have to watch me fail over and over again.

Failure is a good thing; it means I am taking risks.

This is something I have always wanted to do — paint literal landscapes. Oh, sure, I’ve done the odd sketch or watercolor here and there. But I have never applied a disciplined approach to representational landscape painting, and I don’t think I have really even tried any representational oil painting since college. I’ve always wanted a french easel, and I’ve always wanted to paint en plein air. It’s January, so this is not the time for that. But working alla prima is a refreshing break from the slow layering process of the other paintings I have been making over the past decade.

I have given myself permission to make these paintings. (And yes, it was me and my self-conscious awareness of a persona that made landscape paintings verbotten.) I’m taking these little paintings seriously in the respect that I know I have something to learn here. Like I said in an earlier post, I don’t know where this is headed, but I’ll enjoy the ride.

Oh, and the vocabulary! The words rolling around in my head while I work are like old friends come round for a visit: alla prima, scumble, glaze, impasto.

Until tomorrow’s failure,

Matthew

It takes so dang long to get to the point where I can start putting color on a panel, then the rest goes so fast… I’m a little farther along than his image, but here’s the first passes of color on the 42″ panel. The tag on the wall is the mass tone of the color I’ve mixed — it’s primarily pyrrole orange, modified by diarylide yellow and transparent yellow iron oxide.

A Studio full of prints was what I got for my effort yesterday morning. The whole thing went really beautifully. The vacuum table worked perfectly, and I only had a few pulls that were throw-aways (which is good because I didn’t have that much in the way of extra paper).

When I was done printing, and was cleaning the screen out, the stencil sort of self-destructed under the water. Normally, it’s supposed to take Mr. Clean to get it out of the screen, but for some reason the sprayed-on stencil must be more vulnerable. So I guess that definitely puts a cap on edition size. Fine by me. Looks like this will be an edition of 25 with 2 artist proofs.

They said it couldn’t be done — a soft-edged serigraph? Madness!

Now that the process is proven, I need to buy a stack of Stonehenge paper and mix a big batch of ink, and I’ll be ready to pull an edition, maybe even this weekend.

Someday, I should do a step-by-step of this. Today is not that day.

Still, here’s a close-up of the edge of a panel I am preparing:

This is 1/2″ Baltic birch plywood for the surface, and 1″X 2″ poplar for the edges. Once the panel is glued together and sanded down, I start in on the surface. I begin with several coats of matte medium to seal the surface, scraping it into the wood grain with a plastic squeegee. Then comes the gesso/matte medium mix, applied with a foam roller. I probably end up rolling on 6-10 coats per panel with the roller. Once I have sufficient white built up, I start alternating between sanding and scraping in another layer of the gesso/matte medium mixture. Eventually, this leaves me with a very smooth, absolutely white surface with the texture of vellum.

All in all, there are at least 20 coats of gesso and/or medium that go into every surface preparation, and in some cases many more. The panel pictured above is ready to go. You can see the cornice of gesso that has built up over the edge. Once the painting is complete, this cornice will be trimmed off with a small block plane, and the sides will be sanded again.

Next post: watching paint dry!

Now in progress. I have to admit that painting on this scale isn’t as difficult as I had feared. The techniques that I use on smaller pieces scale up pretty nicely, with some small adaptations. I have to walk on my tip-toes to work at the top of the canvas, but I had initially thought I would have to use some sort of scaffold to manage the top.

I’m at that point where the interplay between the banding and the all-over glazes has started: back-and-forth each time I work on it. The next trick will be knowing when to stop.