Nikki Gemmell interview

A funny example of life turning full cycle: on 5.30pm Wednesday night I’ll be interviewing the writer Nikki Gemmell at the Hunter Writers Centre. I’ve previously blogged about Gemmell’s writing, particularly the erotic best seller The Bride Stripped Bare, and have just finished reading her latest: With My Body. Bride was one of the reasons I started my experiment with erotic literature, and the inspiration for my 1001 nights novella. Another driver was the memory of reading The Story of O while an art student in London. Co-incidentally, With My Body mentions The Story of O (something of an erotic classic) and the main character is a sun-starved Australian living in London. I can vividly recall this feeling that there was never enough light. At the height of one particularly dreary winter I remember staggering into a South Kensington solarium and spending a happy hour zapping myself with carcinogenic rays.

Anyway, if you’re in Newcastle on Wednesday afternoon, I might see you at the Hunter Writers Centre.

 

 

 

2011: the wrap

I did get a lot done this year, just not the things I had planned to do. I know this because at the back of my desk diary I keep a list of priorities, goals, daydreams, aspirations and plans. Some of these are the low level bottom feeder kind of tasks, for example ‘learn how to use Excel’, so I don’t have to endure the humiliation of submitting my tax information in a Word document to my accountant. Others are more lofty, vague and ambitious like ‘have a son’.

On a list titled ’2011 Goals: big and small’ which features twenty-two items, I managed to achieve exactly two things: I didn’t pay for parking at the University where I periodically work (I’m too miserable to buy parking vouchers and prefer a long walk into campus from an outlying car park. Faced with a choice between torrential rain, and paying $3.40 for a car space, I’ll always opt for a drenching). And I brought myself a nice pair of new trainers. Things I failed to achieve included: selling my house, the proper management of paperwork, finishing my crime novel and, something of a perennial favourite, getting rid of my gut!

On a list of thirty-two things I’d planned to do to my house, before selling it, I managed to achieve exactly (drum roll, please) five items. And that’s actually being generous with the point scores. The problem with the house (I like to blame the house) is that it’s one of those little 1960s fisherman’s shacks, originally a one room place, that later had a kitchen and bathroom added. I like rich colours, so when we first moved in, I made the mistake of painting the walls deep reds and greens. Unfortunately, being a small, square box of a house, it ended up looking like a Rubrick’s Cube. I’ve just finished painting everything white.

Then there’s a problem with my interior design sense, which could be kindly described as problematic. I prefer a style of home furnishings that lives comfortably with notions of kitsch, tack and overkill. Merging bordello themes (a penchant for furry blankets and velvety red and shiny gold fabrics) with a love of brightly coloured Indian and Asian Art, I effortlessly manage to create something that looks like the worst kind of Gentleman’s Club. Imagine some kind of colonial era bounder, staggering from one budget opium den to another, pausing for relaxation at a B grade antique shop, and you’ve got the picture.

'coastal'

I’m currently trying to emiliorate my own lack of taste by re-branding the place as ‘coastal’. This involves painting everything white and sticking stuff in wicker baskets (though why the f**k people do this is beyond me. The baskets are too small to hold anything useful, you can’t see what’s in them, and if you have too many of them you create this creepy Ali Baba and the Fourty Thieves feel). I’m picking up paint charts and going ‘mmnnnn, beige’. However just when the thought of all this beige got too much, I told myself that the house didn’t have to be ‘coastal’ it could be ‘coastal eccentric‘. This, I rationalised, would allow me the freedom to celebrate my own interior design excesses within a soothing cocoon of pale walls and floors.

So far the path to coastal eccentric has not run smoothly. I’ve found that the combination of a hot pink sari, casually thrown over a soft green leather sofa, just looks weird against a white wall. It seems as if the turquoise kitchen tiles that I so lovingly selected will tend to jump out, even against the calming influence of a beige backdrop. Then there’s this irresistable inclination to dot the bare expanses of white walls with LOTS of pictures. Frankly, it looks as if two different people live in the house and couldn’t decide what they liked.

Similarly my Arts career ran this year like it was being managed by a job sharing genius and idiot. For every resounding success there was an equally prattish custard-pie-in-face failure. The days the genius was on board, I managed to win just under $50k worth of grants, published a book and a journal article, participated in ten group art exhibitions, co-curated a successful touring artists’ books exhibition, published an article in an international art mag, and ran a couple of pretty cool community art projects. When the idiot took over, however, I couldn’t do a thing right. The list of knock backs, failed funding applications, refused opportunities, and politely phrased  rejection letters (ranging from the polite ‘oh, we just had so many great applicants’ to a hissy subtext of ’are you kidding?’) was monumental. Unfortunately as if so often the case, as everyone tries to clear their desk before the holidays, most of these missives arrived just before Christmas, leaving me wondering why on earth the idiot had been rostered on at this important time of year.

Chasing tigers

The good news is that my latest painting, the Tiger Bride, is almost finished. The bad news is that the human propensity to fiddle is potentially endless. And so it is that I have been hovering over the canvas with a tiny brush, making minute changes that no-one is likely to notice. Or even if they did notice, it’s doubtful whether it would make any difference to their reading of the image. Still, one is compelled to fiddle, even though there has to be a point where you say ‘enough! the bloody thing is finished’.

So why all the last minute angsting over trivial details of virtually nil visual impact? A good question! It’s partly a desire to make the painting as whole as it can be. When I get to this point in a painting, the big decisions are no longer clear (such as where the large forms go and what they look like). It’s just thousands of tiny little decisions that could go one way or the other. For example, does the veil need some ribbons blowing around it to increase the sense of dynamism? It’s essentially quite a static image, painted with small, tight brushstrokes, and the ribbons could help add movement. Or flow.

And if I add more detail to the Cape Barren Geese, will this help jump them forward into the foreground? At the moment they’re hovering tonally on the same plane as the stone wall. If I do add detail, what do I add? I had this idea of dressing them in natty little green velvet capes with lace bonnets. But if I do this, will it look incorrigibly naff? More specifically, will it take the image too far down the road towards children’s book illustration, bringing a kind of Wind in the Willows tendency into something that is supposed to be pretty but also ambiguous and hopefully potent.

As you can see, the green velvet capes, complete with frilly neck-lines, made the cut. Their colour (chromium oxide) is too buzzy, much too high a key for the rest of the painting, so next time I’m in the studio I’ll calm them down with a pale tint.

The other reason why it’s sometimes hard to finish paintings is more oblique. One gets so fond of them, they dominate your thoughts for a period of time, and it’s hard to let go. I’m visually monogamous: I like working intensely on just one image at a time. I find that flicking between images, though productive, dilutes the intensity required to make anything good. But this is just me, everyone works differently.

I am however fine with working up the underpainting layers of other canvases while I’m concentrating on one main image. This is a shot of a painting, I’ve nicknamed it church, that will eventually show a small, squat colonial era church with two children at the front, possibly holding animals. I return to this image, again and again, which is odd as I don’t even particularly like American Gothic. 

In a moment of clarity in the studio yesterday, I worked out that most of my images talk about female power. I was musing about the church image, and thinking that I may try painting a 3/4 view of the building, showing some nice sandstone details along the side. But for some reason I couldn’t break away from the image of the church, with a centrally placed door, and a curving path leading up to the entrance. Eventually I decided that the door acts as a kind of female phallic symbol, both a literal and a metaphorical gateway.

This is the photograph, of a Tasmanian church, that I’m using as reference. There’s something terribly mawish about this door.

In other news, I’ve repainted the background to the Dodo with children in snowstorm image (it will probably have a better title eventually, but that’s its working name). I wanted the three figures to form a triangle, and visually operate as a pieta, with the human figures a descending series of forms curved over the dodo, the solid base of the triangle. Anyway, the whole group was off centre, and it wasn’t working.

I also abandoned my plan to paint a mountain, Hobart’s Mount Wellington, in the background. Firstly because I didn’t have decent reference material (despite my many trips to Tasmania to gather reference material, I had somehow forgotten to photograph the mountain that looms over the small city). And secondly because it would have closed in the pictorial space at a time when I’m trying to open it up and play with depth.

Here’s the underpainting of another image, it will eventually depict two girls standing on a beach, wearing colonial era ball gowns and animal masks. One will have her hands raised, pushing the mask off her face (perceiving the history of the place), a pose that dates back, at least in my imagination, to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I’m looking forward to this painting, imagining it as gelato coloured, all light pink, olive green, white and pale grey.

Surprisingly, one of my favourite parts of Tiger Bride was painting the lace. If you get up close, there’s some quite odd symbols and patterns woven into the pattern, including Pacific tribal motifs and things that look like crop circles. In retrospect, the lace looked better when parts of it were left sheer, as opposed to covered with ‘embroidery’, but I went a bit OCD and didn’t notice this until I’d finished. At this stage I thinking that I can use lace as the visual motif that ties this exhibition together: I like the way it both obscures and consolidates forms. Incidentally the exhibition that these paintings are for, Strange Tales, has been moved back a couple of months. It will now open at Despard Gallery, Tasmania, in late April 2012.

Today’s tiger

For those of you have been following the progress of my latest painting, Tiger Bride, you’ll be relieved to hear that the damned thing is nearly finished. Today was spent fiddling with minor details such as a the rose petal shower (the petals themselves, up close, look a bit like autopsy tissue samples), the girl’s hands and the tiger’s peculiar harness. I also painted the first layer of the bride’s veil, trying to use the translucent layer of paint to ‘free up’ some of the rather stiff brushwork that characterises the rest of the image.

After fiddling with the painting for most of the morning, I began work on another three canvases, all more or less the same size as Tiger, about 4 foot or 5 foot squarish. One is a funny image of a couple of Victorian looking children cuddling a dodo in a snowstorm (just can’t get enough of those extinct species!) Then there’s a seascape with two girls on a beach, one reaching her arms up to push an animal mask off her face. And the final image is a recurring obsession, a lot like Grant Wood’s famous American Gothic, of two figures standing outside an old church. I’ve painted this latter image so many times that today, when I was drawing it up on the canvas, it literally felt like I was tracing the image.

The process of painting extinct species is oddly unsettling. First of all I trawled through old photographs, and representations, of thylacines to try and work out what the Tasmanian Tiger really looked like. As I mentioned in a previous post, the discovery of their ‘stiff, unwaggable tail’ was strangely exciting, as was an old memoir written by an Englishwoman living on the island during the colonial era. It was moving experience to read, though described in dismissive terms, about the sight of a female Tiger hunting with her pups, nose to the ground as she tracked  prey. “A pretty picture” noted the writer with a sniff, unaware that she was documenting a dying breed.

Similarly the Dodo representations tell you as much about the human artist as they do about the animal. Some dodo images are butterball fat, with enviably chunky drumsticks and squat little legs. These images scream “I am food: eat me!” to the viewer. One look at chubby birdy and you can tell in a flash why they went extinct. They’re the Colonel Sanders icons of the Age of Discovery. Hmmnnn…. that advertising jingle springs to mind, “I feel like Dodo tonight, like Dodo tonight”.

Other images show a more graceful elongated duck. One memorable etching depicts a stretched duck-like bird with legs firmly anchored under its bottom, making it unlikely that the bird could ever walk, let alone run away from potential predators. Dodos are variously imagined as deformed pelicans, bulked up macaws or as an exotic version of the Christmas turkey.

 

Tiger, tiger, tiger

The Tiger Bride is gradually being completed, or as it so often feels with a painting, finishing itself. Like the cycle of a typical love affair, images hit the stage where there is nothing more to be learned/nothing left to discover/nothing more to give, and this is usually when you decide the painting is finished.

These photographs were taken over a period of at least two weeks, possibly three, I’ve lost count. And to complicate things, they’re not necessarily in order…

The snake resembles the scroll at the bottom of a medieval manuscript, it was re-drawn to fix the weird flattish angle on the last curve from the left. I had intended for the snake to be facing the other way, as nearly every other creature is pointing left, but it wasn’t to be.

Deciding that the red of the dress was too flat a colour, and rather cliched, I moved it towards a rose pink. It now looks uncomfortably like bubbling lava or a river of blood.

The tiger sporting his bridle and natty harness.

I’m currently using reference material, for the dress and hairstyle, from Tasmanian colonial paintings. My favourite era was early on, before more skilled painters began to emigrate to the new colony. There’s a kind of freshness about the early stuff, an earnestly naive attempt to ‘get it right’ and follow the fashions of far away Europe, a well intentioned dislocation. In the early paintings, sleek racehorses float a few inches off impossibly green grass; a salon painter labours over the painting of a glass, a piece of lace, in a desperate attempt to show that he can ‘do it’; family portraits show each person from a slightly different perspective; and native animals are this weird concoction of familiar species: a kangaroo typically has the ears of a rabbit and the legs of a hound.

 

The tiger bride continues…

More updates on the painting I’m currently working on in my studio, The tiger bride, a largish oil on canvas of about 4′ x 5′. Like so many artworks, it is nothing like I had imagined it would be, and by the time it’s finished, I expected it will bear little resemblance to the original sketch.

I hadn’t actually intended to paint something so detailed, complex and well, labour intensive. Most of the time now I’m working with very small brushes, it feels like you are embroidering the surface of the canvas with a tiny needle. I had a couple of visual flashes the other day, the first was how I wanted the figure to look (kind of dewy and airbrushed, like fashion photography or a high kitsch religious icon) and the second was of the tiger (greyish silver, every hair gleaming and distinct, like a cross between natural history illustration and the painful sincerity of naive art).

The intricacies of the surface reflect my long standing fascinating with Persian miniatures, where patterning is used to show spatial depth, and every inch of the picture’s surface is laden (groaning even) with detail. I’m interested in what happens when you take this kind of visual language and use it on a large image. My desire is to create something that is strange and claustrophobic, almost hallucinogenic, but it may always fail and come across as extreme naffness: a Disney fairy tale stage set.

It’s that old thing about wanting to quote traditions without being subsumed by them. So I want the painting to reference the visual traditions of forms such as colonial art, naive painting and children’s book illustration but still be something separate and distinct. And with a darker edge: if it’s just a pretty image, then for me the thing doesn’t work. A subtext needs to be there, but neither obscure or obvious, balanced somewhere between the two extremes.

Another old idea, that of a trinity of figures. In this image I’ve just started sketching in the bride’s ‘handmaiden’s', actually two Cape Barren Geese, indigenous to Tasmania. This is quietly humorous as Cape Barren Geese, from what I can remember from a camping trip on Maria Island, are cantankerous, stumpy and cross.

I dug up some more reference material for the Tasmanian Tiger. I’d been using an old black and white postcard, a photograph of the last couple of Tigers in captivity in Hobart Zoo, and a colour postcard of their skins. Then I found an early artist’s drawing that suggests that they had this line of white fur running underneath their jaws, down their chests, under the belly and extending through to a narrow line on the front of their rear haunches. I also found out that the tail was ‘stiff and unwaggable’, like a kangaroos, a piece of information I found oddly exciting. It was the word ‘unwaggable’ that did it.

More decorative elements have been added to this version; there’s some clematis on a bush to the left (from a book on Tasmanian flora). A proud notation states that they found ‘this magnificent display’ next to the East Derwent Highway. The flowers make this green foliage look even more like a screen, rather than a three dimensional form, I’m currently musing whether I like this or if it just looks wrong. A painting I worked on a couple of years ago, The Waterhole, featured a group of lollipop trees, each round circle of foliage operating as a series of flat, decorative overlapping shapes.

My sense is that this painting is nearly finished, although as I said earlier, I’m not sure what its final form will be. I’m still looking for some other element (perhaps the veil, perhaps the girl’s hair, perhaps a mask) that will make sense of all the painting’s disparate elements. Something that will make it potent. At the moment, there’s this feeling that it’s like a car body without an engine.

Finally, on the topic of how art has the potential to send one completely around the twist, check out this article from GQ. It just made me wanna get into the movie business!

Days whenever…

Life, as they say, gets in the way. In this case it got in the way of posting regular updates about the progress of The Tiger Bride. And, more specifically, I’ve lost track of how many days I’ve been working on the image: I think it’s about thirteen or fourteen.

The painting has changed quite substantially. I decided that the tilted stone wall, rather than being visually edgy and interesting, was just plain wrong. So that got re-painted.

The next thing that went, ironically given that he was such a major part of the original composition, was the boy cradling the tiger’s head.

Artist angsting over painting!

I felt that the painting would work well with three elements: girl, animal and landscape, but not four. I also liked the ambiguity of the image once the boy was removed, with the displacement of the traditional boy meets girl dynamic, a whole host of strange possibilities open up: is the girl in fact the tiger’s bride? I’ve been reading some lovely fairy tales where ‘bride marries animal; animal turns out to be handsome prince enchanted by evil witch; animal removes skin and out steps a human’. Nice. There’s a nifty version when the bride decides to trap her husband in his human form by hurling his animal skin into the fire while he sleeps.

(Working wet on wet for the sky in this image; trying to get the everyday melodrama of Tasmanian cloud formations).

I’ve recently written a version of the tiger bride fairy tale, it’s part of the 1001 nights novella that I’ve blogged about earlier, but the roles are reversed. A human husband discovers his bride in her tiger skin, decides he prefers her that way, and throws her human skin onto the fire. I had this really strong, if grotesque, vision of a female skin flying through space, legs flopping around like stockings, breasts flaps waving in space.

Forming up the landscape in this version, still using photographic reference from my last trip to the island. I’m not exactly sure where the shot of the landscape was taken, somewhere in the north east. Also strengthening the drawing of the tiger, trying to get my head around the anatomy of something that I have never seen.

In this image, the mountains on the left hand side of the range have been blocked in.

A bad, blurry photograph of more work being done on the landscape. Trying to balance the tonal values so that the tall tree in the foreground, on the left hand side, doesn’t jump out too much. Compositionally it’s kind of balanced by the tiger’s tail, you can see a left to right diagonal running through the piece which starts in the tall tree and ends in the tail. I think of the girl as sitting at the junction of a number of V shapes; it makes it quite a stable image that I’m planning to upset by painting in a veil blowing in the wind. The veil will hopefully add some dynamism back into the whole shebang.

The mountain range looks almost predatory.

I have this tendency to see space like a naive painter, so everything is flat or tipped up, or layered like a theatre set (one flat thing placed in front of another). I’m currently playing with things so I can introduce more of a sense of space, but on my own terms; I’m not interested in traditional pictorial space (i.e. things look like you’re looking out a window, everything recedes in a predictable fashion, things that are further away are less tonally distinct than things up close). And, like a naive painter, I don’t really like complex angles as straightforward or profile shapes seem visually more honest.

The dress reminds me of the figure on the front of Rolls Royces: a bit Art Nouveau.

I’m not entirely sure what I was working on here, I expect the landscape and perhaps fiddling with the wall (which is still too cartoony for its own good).

I was talking to my grandmother about this painting the other day. Now my 92 year old Nana is a good person to talk to about painting, with my grandfather she opened up a commercial art gallery in Hobart (I believe it was the first one); she also paints, writes poetry and taught art for a number of years. I was saying that this was the first major work for my next show at Despard Gallery, Strange Tales, and that I’d be happy to get it finished and out of the way. I mean, if you cock up the first painting in a series, self doubt starts to set in. And unfortunately the way I work means that the risk of failure is pretty much neck and neck with getting something good, or at least it feels like that.

Anyway I described this painting as a ‘heartbreaker’ and Nana took me the wrong way, thinking that it was something that had been sucking up emotional energy, and so she blurted out ‘you must take care of yourself, dear’. When I’d actually meant that it was difficult technically speaking. However, on reflection, it’s actually a much sadder painting that I’d envisaged and I think that’s why it’s giving me some grief, and also why I’ve been reluctant to blog about its progress.

Victorian melodrama at play: the red dress arrives. Eventually this red dress will be thoroughly OTT, covered with lots of tiny bows and flounces like sea anemones. It’s important to me that the dress is at least as animated as the landscape and has a strange, female potency- a kind of entrancing, hypnotic, sucking quality.

At this stage the image is looking more like bride of Braveheart than anything else, something about the Scottish highlands in that background. And this is only going to get worse if I put in a mask or some other facial decoration, vaguely considering blue skin or an animal feature. I’m already anticipating the ripping off I shall receive from painting someone who looks like me (actually it’s from a photo of my daughter) in a classic regal pose riding on the Tasmanian State emblem. Like a radio play, I can hear this script: (Tasmanian artist in a whiney, aggrieved tone) ‘who the f**k does she think she is?’

You’ve got to stripe it, stripe it (to the tune of you’ve got to move it, move it…) And so the distinguishing feature arrives. Even if the viewer hadn’t already guessed the identity of the thylacine, this leaves one in no doubt. Next step is to grey down the gravel path underfoot, work on the flesh, do some more on the dress and the tiger fur. I’m playing around with lots of ideas, this desire to paint a rain of petals bursting from the sky like snow, this hankering after red and white roses, a longstanding inability to paint a human face without animalising it in some way. Such a sad, romantic image, the constant elegy of painting an extinct species, the gothic majesty of Tasmania’s landscape, a girl bravely attempting something ridiculous and impossible.

Days six and seven

Paintings, like people, go through rough patches. Many paintings, again like people, start off beautifully: all fresh, clear and focussed. Unfortunately the process of actually painting (deciding how something should look, the drawing and composition, paint applications, considering possible readings of the imagery) erodes this initial clarity, particularly during the mid stages of the painting, which is where this one is now. I think of it as being like a mid life crisis! There’s this nice initial burst of enthusiasm, and clarity, when you’ve had this great idea and just want to paint it. Then the process of actually making the thing takes its toll, and enthusiasm wanes (I once read a great definition of ‘character’, as in to show character. It was continuing to pursue a project long after the initial burst of enthusiasm fades). Towards the end of most paintings, fortunately, there’s often a feeling of synthesis, as if all the threads have come together. But I’m not there with this one yet.

The good news is that it now has a provisional title: it’s either The Tiger Bride or Tiger Bride. I’m a bit sick of putting ‘the’ in front of all my titles, makes the paintings sound like 60s supergroups, however if I leave the ‘the’ off, it reminds me of 90s bands (Blur, Oasis et al). I can’t win! The title came out of a misunderstanding with my Aunty Pam. She emailed me about the painting, and mistaking the girl’s white dress for a wedding gown, referred to it as the ‘tiger’s bride’. I think the phrase ‘delicate subjugation’, written on the canvas earlier in the piece, and the sweetness of the image, probably helped formulate a marital interpretation.

Speaking of sweet images, a friend recently described my imagery as being stuck somewhere between ‘heart warming and heart rending’. I thought this was a great observation, neatly encapsulating what I’m trying to do with them, this balance between sweetness and horror. They don’t work if they’re just pretty, they don’t work if they’re just angsty, they function if both these elements are somehow balanced. Despite the fact that I’m trying to rid myself of lingering romantic delusions about painting, I know they don’t work unless the emotional aspect is spot on. Essentially I need to feel the paintings very clearly and deeply to get them to work.

I remember sitting around with a group of painters once, this was years ago, we were talking about love and relationships. I remember one man told the story of love gone wrong, and the rest of us listened supportively, making sure our kind faces were in place (he was a good guy). There was a brief pause when he’d finished, then he commented, in a completely different kind of voice, ‘got some good paintings out of it though!’ This sudden light surge of amusement flashed through the room as everyone went ‘ah ha!’ and grinned at each other. Not sure if this says anything good about artists, I suspect not, but it was an entertaining moment.

Still buggering around with the technical aspects of this work, the bones, if you like. The rock wall ended up being at a much greater angle than I’d anticipated, partly as the result of working in a small studio, you can’t get back far enough to check for distortion. But although it’s technically wrong, I kind of like its wack job awkwardness, and the way it counterbalances the diagonal of the mountain range in the background. You keep looking at the painting because the diagonal of the wall is so unsettling, like the deck of a ship, visually people seek balance and symmetry.

If the wall was completely horizontal, it would ground the painting too much, turn it into a static image, and make the wall between wild landscape and figures seem like an overly rigid (visual) barrier. Thematically, the whole painting is about boundaries, between men and women, humans and animals, tame and wild, wilderness and garden. It’s got to be both accurate and wrong, this is not a good description, and I’m not even entirely sure what it means, but it’s what I’m aiming for.

Day five

Day five in the studio was another short day. I have this routine, three days a week (when Sophie is in daycare): go to the gym for an hour in the morning, write for between one and two hours, then get into the studio at about midday and work until 4pm. At the moment I’m working on my neglected PhD, trying to cram a stack of writing and research into the next four months, while I’m still officially on leave from the program.

In the studio, day five involved getting oilier with my oil paints. All this means is that when you start painting with oils, the first layers have more turps (or solvent) in them, and as you lay down subsequent layers, you progressively mix more and more oil (or medium) in with the paint. Some people express this as working ‘lean to fat’. The reason for it is pretty simple. If you imagine mixing up some salad dressing in a jar, usually oil and vinegar, unless you shake it really hard all the oil will float to the top. This is because the oil is lighter than the acidic vinegar. (Or if you’ve ever worked in a bar, you’ll know that Baileys floats on just about anything else!).

It’s exactly the same principle with oil paint: you start painting with more turps (the vinegar) because if you did it the other way around, the layers with oil in them would try to ‘float’ to the top of the painting. This damages the substrate (think of a painting as being like a geological formation, or layers of different types of rock) because you’ve created something that is inherently unstable. Although we’re only talking about stuff that happens at a molecular level, the oil will always want to migrate to the surface of the painting. Like layers of rock, if the one down the bottom (and I’m talking small changes and very slow speeds here) moves faster than the ones above it, the surface of the earth will eventually give way and crack. Essentially an oil painting works the same way.

Another reason for working lean to fat is practical. Oil paint with more turps in it dries faster than oil paint with a greater ratio of oil in it. Turps, or solvent, has a much faster evaporation rate than oil (which relies on other stuff in the paint, and environmental factors such as heat and airflow, to dry). Painters typically spend the first phases of a painting working out the composition (some people plan this meticulously before beginning, other people, like me, like to embrace chaos or instinct) and blocking in their tonal values (I’m talking about relatively traditional methodologies here). Like laying the foundations of a house, it’s about big decisions and underlying structure, not fine detail. So you want to get it done quickly and be able to move the paint around freely, also quickly paint over stuff that isn’t working. If you’re working with very oily paint, this just can’t happen, as you’ll be sitting around waiting for it to dry.

 

Another factor is that very turpsey paint won’t stick to very oily paint: it just beads and splits. Imagine the way spilled water separates into little drops or pools on a glossy marble bench top and you’ve got the picture. The water can’t soak into the surface, and the shininess of the surface repels it, so there’s nothing for the liquid to do except cling to itself. The same thing applies to oil and turps (or solvent): generally the turps won’t spread across the surface, because the surface is repelling it, and surface tension kicks in, encouraging the turps to form droplets (as opposed to spreading out in a flat layer). Fascinating stuff!

Finally a good reason for fat over lean is that some artists like to mix glazes (transparent or semi transparent layers of coloured oil paint with a high ratio of oil to turps) and apply them to the final stages of their painting. Again, this is a fairly traditional methodology. The purpose of a glaze is to make the paintings colours look richer, deeper or darker (or sometimes to make the surface of the painting shinier). If you imagine the way light goes through a stained glass window, this is sort of how a glaze works. Light passes through the glaze, a transparent layer of paint, hits the underpainting, and bounces back up again (refracts). The light coming off the surface of the painting intensifies its colour, making it blaze, just like sunlight through coloured glass. Very pretty.

If you wasted your formative years on a surfboard, you’ll intuitively understand how a glaze works. Picture this: sunny day, blue sky, drifting around on clear water in an area with sparkling white crystalline sand. As you get closer to shore, light hits the water, goes through it, hits the white sand on the bottom, and bounces up again. The water is an intense blue-green and the refracted light makes it hard to see. This, my friend, is like a glaze.

 

 

 

Days two, three and four…

 

 

 

Day two and three in the studio (not consecutive) involve more layers of acrylic paint and fiddling with the drawing…

It’s about this stage that I started missing oil paint, its sticky richness and intensity of colour. The acylic is fine for the underpainting, helps seal the canvas and means that you’re not waiting around for ages until it dries. It’s nice to handle, non toxic, ideal for mucking around with image and composition, but it just doesn’t have that…. thing.

I think it’s about this point that I started using oil paint over the top of the dry acrylic underpainting.

Me!

Reference material: the poor, doomed thylacines (Tasmanian Tiger).

What the painting looked like at the end of day three.

Came into the studio on day four and decided that I was creating major compositional, not to mention aesthetic, problems for myself. The mountain range behind the figures was originally planned to open up, on the right, into a wide bowl shaped valley. This would have given the painting some depth, a sense of space. However with the mountain rapidly turning into a one dimensional granite escarpment, and the low stone wall acting as another visual barrier, the whole thing was getting visually claustrophic. I dragged out some of my holiday snaps from Tasmania and decided to repaint the background using an actual mountain view as reference.

Nothing beats the real

The first stage involved repainting the sky with pale greys.

The next phase involved working out the tonal gradations and colours of the mountain ranges in the background. Using various mixes of warm grey at this point, mixed with some burnt umber, a bit of paynes grey, some black, titanium white, yellow, chromium green oxide and a couple of miscellaneous tubes of grey paint that my Aunty Pam gave me.

The final stage of day four, which was a short day in the studio. It still looks like a mess, but I’m much happier with the composition. Next step is to work on the rock wall in the foreground, using the following image as reference (it’s outside a country church in Tasmania).

More reference material…

After this I’ll go hunting for figure reference material for the children (probably involves photographing Sophie and one of her mates) and costume reference.