Happy New Year TWENTY TEN
to celebrate the new year 2010, I decided this was as good a time as any to import/export my old blogspot blog from http://artstudio75604.blogspot.com/ to the new one to correctly designate my new location here on the farm. The new blog is called Johnson Creek Studio – Cheryl D. McClure.
Hum…it seems to have imported all my old 300+ blog posts and comments but I will be testing it out. Oh my… I forgot to actually look to see what the new URL is. I think it should be http://www.johnsoncreekstudio.blogspot.com/ but I will check it out and make corrections if needed.
Oh yeah……..back to the new name/title. I thought and thought about what to call this blog with our move over here from last year. I guess I was just talking with my husband about the place and it occurred to me that with this creek running across our property…….I even named a new painting with that title, that this is the perfect title for the blog.
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Almost Winter
I finally drug the two encaustic panels out to the studio porch to photograph them. I was somewhat worried about the wind blowing all of us off but I made it back in before the big gust came. It wasn’t easy as I had to back down some stairs and hard to get the two pieces to line up for the photos. While editing, I could almost crop out part of the edges of the images. I think this is close enough.
They are finished except I will need to paint the edges with something (not wax)to blend with the front of the paintings. It will be considered a diptych…..and I’ve played around with various titles. I think “Almost Winter” will do.
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Studio stuff
I’ve just been refining some on the panels…polishing etc. I made a boo boo one evening and left my pot of medium on low in the crockpot and now I’m having to get it out of the pot and probably never use it. What a waste that is for that much medium.
BUT, I have also been working on putting together some panels I ordered before ever moving. I’m not sure I’m doing this right but I’m gluing and clamping the mitered corners. Then I will use finishing nail/brads and glue to attach the front plywood to the top.
While doing all this little studio stuff I kept glancing out the window out to the south and west of the studio. I’m on the second floor so I have a good view out. I just couldn’t resist taking a couple of pictures with my telephoto lens. One is looking toward our small lake and the others are looking toward the creek bottoms.
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Panel Progress, continued
I realize you may not see differences in today and yesterday……BUT, it IS there. I even did some scraping. For one thing, I’d been working on the second panel more so today I looked and the first panel (which was my favorite) was looking a little rough in comparison to the second one. Now…..do I want to refine the first one more or add more to the second one???
Maybe do both….so I added some more orange and yellow to the second one, camouflaged the edges of the left side of the second one. Edges are SO important in this as in all painting….sharpen some, soften some.
So much to my shoulder’s distress, I kept moving them from wax station to painting wall. I scraped some but I like a certain amount of raw look and texture and not all smooth refined surface. Smooth can be beautiful…on someone else’s painting..not necessarily on MINE.
Looking at them together..if I really want this to be a conjoined two panel painting I might add some more linear work and wax to the right one to connect more to the left side. As a separated diptych or just two panels in the same group, I could just leave it alone. If I ‘connect’ them, I might want to add more neutral white in the right one as it has so much less and is more than a little yellow in the background areas compared to the left.
Decisions, decisions….all is decision and looking at the relationships.
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Panel Progress, continued
The bottom photo is after I’ve been working for a short time adding color and neutral pigments. The one above is a closer in shot of this second panel.
As mentioned yesterday, I wanted to get both panels to about the same amount of finish so they would be compatible to be hung together or NOT.. I work this way with my acrylic on canvas or collage paintings as well. I can complete more with less effort ( I think). I, also, don’t get too bogged down with detail or
too much nuance at the wrong times in the process of working. The work will remain fresher…….and oh yeah, my neck will appreciate it a lot.
The top picture is of the two panels at this stage of the painting process. There is a lot of wax and pigment on all parts of the panels now. The next stages will be to refine or cover/expose. I haven’t done ANY scraping. This is mostly positive painting with a lot of negative painting into it just as I do with acrylic. ..oh yeah and fuse, fuse, fuse.
Negative painting sure does turn on the right side of the brain…and time flies.
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Panel Progress
I started back in on the panels again today. I made some progress on one of them.
First, I did decide that I thought I would go with yellow as the accent with these black, gray and white (whitish)paintings.
SO…I got out my oil sticks and made more marks and scribbles around as is my general method of working. You do have to start somewhere. ..and this was it for me. I did this on my wall easel again so I could actually see what I was doing. It is near impossible to see anything working on something fairly large laying flat out on a table.
I did say yellow……..but that means all kinds a varieties of yellows from lemon to ochre…..AND I LOVE orange.
Then I took one of the panels down and carried it back to my studio kitchen aka encaustic painting area. This place is never going to be the same..in the sunlight I could see fine drops of wax flying in the air..off to furniture and almost certainly to the floor, my jeans and shoes. I wouldn’t have know for some time if the sun hadn’t come raking through the windows just so.
Anyway…this one panel has a good second layer of scribbling, scumbling, and more laying down of encaustic medium with various pigments glazed in.
I think I will work on the other one next to keep these works going in tandem and try not to get too finished on one before moving on to the other.
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Panel Progress
I’ve had a good day although it must look like I haven’t done that much. Those of you who work with encaustic know that working on 24 x 48″ panels takes a little more time than throwing some acrylic around for one layer. There are two panels here. I decided to load them all to a folder in Picasa for viewing. There are labels for each picture.
As I mentioned before…I mounted watercolor paper to these panels so that wax would absorb into the surface. I was afraid the old surface might not work for wax painting. I had space left at each end so I put some paper I found that probably came from all those gorgeous papers I find at art supply stores. I tore off some charcoal colored heavy paper and mounted it at the bottoms.
OK..where to go from here?? Guess I’ll just do what I do with other paintings while forgoing the toning I usually do………I get out the willow charcoal and just make marks. Whatever marks are my marks for the day…just depends on the mood. I don’t analyze it or put any intellectual thought into what kind of mark I’m going to make. You can cover it up later if you want to anyway. One good thing about encaustic and acrylic painting…guess that is my attraction to both mediums.
I’m also attracted to the use of collaged elements in paintings and with wax, no glue is needed since the wax with hold it down…and you can cover as much or little as you like.
I don’t know yet if there will be any more added or not but for unity, there probably will be some since that is a heavy element there in the bottom of the picture plane right now. One bad about having a panels with hangers already on them…might make for a problem if I like them better horizontal or upside down. Oh well…I will face that problem if it arises later. I can remove those hangers and move them for sure.
Humm..now to dream…what color or no color or what?? Guess I’ll find out as I go.
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Panel Prep Continued
I finally got back up to the studio to work on the other panel I am preparing for encaustic. I took a couple of pictures the other day…then the camera battery went dead earlier when I was going to show the sanding, etc. Oh well, …here are pictures of the panels prepped, drying and waiting for the wax..tomorrow, I hope.
Oh yeah, you will note that the d ‘Arches is not quite wide enough to go the full 48″ length of the panels. I (on purpose) did not cut into the paper to make it a full coverage. To me that would have been more of a problem to cut straight…and I always figure a little bit of a challenge to work on a project adds dimension to the project in the end. It forces a little more innovation to work with materials in a different way. It makes me come up with a new wheel so to speak.
The second panel didn’t glue down quite so easily as the first. Finally I have it all down though and it looks fine. Then I looked around for more papers or wood strips or anything that might work in that space at the end with no w/c paper on it. I found some good thick paper with lettering on it. This paper will be heavy enough (like the d “Arches to not have medium seep through and ruin the bond with the wax later. I cut and tore it off un-evenly and am now leaving all to dry overnight.
The sides of the panels still have some of the gold covered canvas, slightly sanded. When I get through with the work I will decide then what color to paint or stain them to go with the work. For now, I’m doing nothing to them.
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Panel Prep
Yesterday I decided I had procrastinated enough with some recycled panels my daughter found me…both 24 x 48. I want to use them for encaustic since good panels are expensive. I also want to paint with wax larger. I knew that whatever was on them was not going to be conducive for working with wax as it has to be an absorbent surface. I thought at first it was gold metallic paper but it turned out to be canvas.
SO, instead of heating and sanding it off, I just sanded it and covered it with some of the roll Arches paper I have here and am not using. It turned out that I’m about 3 1/2 inches short on the long end with 44 inch wide paper. But, why not use something else there? That way I won’t have to cut up all that paper into unwieldy strips. I used Nova gloss medium pretty heavily on the panel and weighted down the paper until I could roller/brayer it out. I actually found that the big 12″ wall board knife worked great for this.
This morning I looked and it looks like it is going to stay flat and looks great. SO, will need to do the other one but I will wait until I get this one going first so see if I want to leave that extra edge a little different than on this one so they will work well together as a diptych or pair.
Woo hoo…should be fun to work BIG.
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Johnson Creek, Pasture Land
I just didn’t know what to do with the first painting I started at colony. It was going the same way as many of my Little Pieces of Land paintings. Toned it with a warm ground and drew marks and shapes in my usual mode. That’s the problem…I need to get out of my usual mode now and then. i can’t find the picture here in the house on this computer as I think it is on my laptop in the studio.
This canvas is 48 x 36 and I just broke out a couple of brayers and some left over neutral mixtures of paint I had out from a previous painting and was going to just paint over it and start again. What’s another layer, huh!
Anyway, in the process of covering up, I found something else……..that little bit of land peeping out of the colors I just kept mixing up intuitively. I like it. It’s softer than my usual pieces but that stronger design does come though here and there and marries with the top layer to become its own.
The ranch where we live is about 200 acres and I look out on all this every time I look out the windows in the house or in the studio. There is a creek that runs through named Johnson Creek…………SO, this painting is titled, “Johnson Creek, Pasture Land”.
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