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.

Underpainting: Jesus in the House of Mary and Martha

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.

And I’ll keep the readers of this blog apprised with regular installments.