In the process of creating a large painting, after the photo shoot, there is a lot of editing to do. The photographer delivered 1.5 gigabytes of images. I search through these, looking for the right facial expression for Mary, the right hand gesture for Martha, the right smile for Jesus. I’ll put them all together on canvas.
The photographer noted that to get all these elements right in one photograph would have taken eight hours instead of one or two. It also would have taken real actors. Photography on that scale is exhausting. I know this because I used to sublease my studio from a commercial photographer— and he mostly did tabletop, or product shots. Occasionally he worked with child models for catalogue work, and although professionally experienced, they inevitably broke down in tears after a few hours of work.
As a painter, after the shoot the labor has just begun. I don’t discard any of these photos at this point; I may come back looking for some detail that has yet to occur to me. I initially pick a dozen and print them at 8 ½ x 11, and post them in the studio next to the canvas. At times some printouts will actually get taped to the canvas for closer examination, using a low tack artists’ tape, of course. Later, I’ll need to zoom in on detail, but I may just do that on my laptop, setting the computer on a stool where I can see it and poke at it.
In some cases, as with this year’s Recognizing Jesus, a complex perspective necessitates a pencil drawing transferred to the canvas using a cartoon (as defined back in Michelangelo’s day). But with this painting, as with most, I do not do a pencil drawing, other than marking the canvas at various measurements I’ll want to remember. I begin with a four-inch brush from Home Depot, as if painting a house. I squeeze some burnt umber onto my palette, dip my brush in thinner, and wash the whole canvas until it is a light, sandy brown. I spend some more of that umber, drawing out the perspective of the room with the big brush. The surface darkens as I begin to fill in shadows, and with looping approximation, rough in the location of characters. This room has a lot of shadows, so by now I’ve spent a lot of umber. Eventually I’m drawing with a smaller brush— a one-inch flat.
To correct and refine my drawing, I pull out light areas with turpentine (or citrus thinner, at this stage, because it costs less). I bin to add highlights with Naples yellow, and eventually titanium white. The first real color I add is Venetian red, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I don’t mean just in my explanation. I get ahead of myself as I paint. As I begin drawing the figures, I’m impatient to begin coloring them. I want to paint the faces, the robes, Martha’s arm. I’m loving Martha’s arm. It establishes the energy of the whole composition. But I still need to lay out the whole layout. Figures may still move; it would be a waste to spend too much time on a face, and then need to move it. I did this already with Jesus’ face. You see it here about four inches to the right of where I first put it. Martha used to be bigger, too. I may yet move the table. I’d like to have more disciples than I was able to get for the photo shoot.
There’s just so much to do.
There will be as many as a couple dozen layers before the painting is done, each built upon the under painting and successive layers, a medium of Damar varnish, stand oil, and turpentine glazing the whole.
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