Jesus in the House of Mary and Martha: Embellishing the Under Painting

This is the third installment in blogging the progress of painting Jesus in the House of Mary and Martha. If this is your first visit, read the first post here, and the second one here.

I suppose if I’d been classically trained, I’d do the under painting all at once, and the next time I touched the canvas, it would be with a glaze of classic medium, and the second layer would be underway. I suppose I might also do that if I had classical discipline, and spent a good ten hours on the under painting at once, or if I properly prepared a complete sketch or cartoon, and knew where everything was going when I began the painting. As it happens, I’ve been noodling at it a couple of hours one morning and some more another afternoon, after doing marketing tasks for the business of painting weddings. So the under painting evolves day by day, and yet still is just the first layer.

Except that I can’t help refining the figures already. I’m already laying in some tertiary colors as I whittle away at Martha and Jesus’ profiles. I think I can get away with this so far, because there isn’t much paint on the canvas, and I haven’t used much medium. But to build a better painting, I need to have patience and sketch out the whole thing in tricolor before layering flesh tones of the principle characters.

I’m using three or four different reference photos for Jesus, but his face is coming from just two of them: the smile from one and the angle from another. Martha comes from many more photos than that. The perfect expression comes from a photo with all the wrong body gesture, another has her hair in front of her face but has wonderful energy in her arms, and so on. I’m still undecided on Mary. I love the shots where her face is in profile, but I prefer her shoulders turned out more. There’s a wonderful highlight on her nose in a shot where her head is turned the wrong direction. But that highlight couldn’t possibly appear when her head is turned the right way, so I can’t use it. The loss is painful to me.

Should I sketch the still life, the table setting, when I’m still considering adding disciples who weren’t in the photo shoot? Might I end up putting one in front of the table, and burying my work? Most likely I will add someone on the left—Doubting Thomas, using the model that posed for him in the painting ‘It Is the LORD’. But I want more than that. I meant for this to be a crowded house.

And I need another yarmulke.

But all I can think of is flesh tones. I can’t wait to glaze cheeks with carmine, glisten the bridges of noses with lead white, and flush carpal veins with manganese blue. What I really, really love, more than anything else, is painting people.