Author Archives: ellentrezevant

About ellentrezevant

I'm an artisanal painter living in Bruges, Belgium and Oceanside, California. My work is figurative in the big picture and abstract in the details.

A Piece of Me #08, encaustic

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A Piece of Me #08, india ink underdrawing over collage,

A Piece of Me #08, encaustic over collage on panel.21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

I approached this panel yesterday in the afternoon. The subject matter was an architectural background but it contained a lot more detail than the previous pieces had. There were a number of planes of light and shadow and even two of the insets contained decorative filigree. So this presented a challenge. The panel had already been prepared with a collage to emphasize the layout. I expected it to help me along the way but wasn’t exactly sure how. The india ink underdrawing, too, indicated the planes and their shadows, plus some of the filigree work. So I turned on my electric pallet and set to it.

I ended up using a yellowish tint for the large foreground planes in contrast to a slightly warmer tint for some planes further back. The two created a nice, gentle contrast to one another. Those two elements along with the planes of gray for the shadows sealed the deal. I let the india ink sneak through to sketchily spell out the filigree. After about two hours I was done. I’m really pleased.

It’s very Tonalist – and very touchy-feely, too.

Description of the whole project here. Technical write up of using encaustic for an indirect painting technique here.

A Piece of Me #23, encaustic

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Third in the series. I’m warming up to the technique. Pun intended. 🙂

A Piece of Me #23, encaustic on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

Underdrawing for A Piece of Me #23.

But what that means is that I’m quickly learning all the tips and tricks I can use to manipulate this waxy paint. For example, I used an iron last time to to melt the paint back off, but then the melted paint stuck to the paper towel which then tore and left shreds on the panel. Not nice. I liked the texture of the paper towel embedded in the waxy paint but not the paper shreds. So today I switched to cheesecloth and had much better luck. It was very absorbent of the wax and left a nice weave pattern in the big open field of tinted yellow ochre. Cool. But then because the procedure had extracted a lot of paint, I painted some light yellow ochre back in to give it mass, then left it alone.

Mixing up the light tint of gray was the next challenge. I used mars black, which is a really neutral black but in the context of the yellow tonality it gets pushed to its complement. The light stripe of gray across the yellow expanse vibrates so very nicely. It’s similar in value but different in hue.

The pavement panels at the base are also tints of mars black, with a few sneaky strokes of burnt umber for spice. The inda ink underdrawing peeks through here and there. Finally I mixed up a darker tint of mars black for the strongest value, forming the meeting point between wall and earth. Ummmmm. I might just try to eat this one for dinner.

Description of the whole project here. Technical write up of using encaustic for an indirect painting technique here.

A Piece of Me #03, encaustic

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A Piece of Me #03 encaustic on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in

The newly revised higher contrast pen and ink underdrawing.

OK, today I completed the second of the encaustic series for the A Piece of Me project. Seen here on the left. Like yesterday’s it was another fairly abstract panel but this time the composition included more detailed shapes, forms and contrasts of light and dark. So after my experience with the first panel, I quickly decided to move away from an underdrawing done in light washes of india ink to a pen and ink drawing which has more contrast. I had already seen yesterday that whatever underdrawing there was (which in that first case was not much) the thick opacity of the encaustic paint quickly obliterated it, rendering it superfluous So, either you forgo the underdrawing altogether or you increase its intensity. I decided to go for the latter. Here to the right then is a photograph of the revised pen and ink underdrawing (completed over the original india ink wash). There are a lot of details which I know will not be seen in the completed painting, but, like the whiskers on a man’s cheek in a painting by Memling or Holbein, these strokes will still have a role to play in the final painting.

So I began my approach as I did yesterday, slapping on coats of white and yellow ochre. I quickly had a mess of nothing. Using paper towels and a hot iron I melted it all off and started over again. (This is common in encaustic.) Still, this melting left an overall tint of yellow to the panel. I mixed up a light tint of white and yellow ochre, which I began applying in small strokes to mimic the architectural forms of bricks, panels and arches. This allowed some of the underdrawing to show through in strategic places. Nice, this was going better now. Then I melted up a tint of burnt umber for the shadowed forms. Using a small brush I lay the shadows in. Again, nice. Taking up the infra red heat lamp I burned it all in. I stopped, satisfied, at least for the moment.

Technical write up of using encaustic for an indirect painting technique here.

A Piece of Me #33, encaustic

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My super-duper thrift store find. Maybe originally intended for fondue? Temperature adjustment dial on the right. The metal and marble plates just above the burner radiate. The little black trays work great for keeping the colours warm above and below.

I’ve finally been able to return to an old mud-pie love: encaustic. It’s a really visceral hands on technique. Melted beeswax and damar varnish are melted together, then dry pigments are added to this molten medium. The pallet then consists of a metal plate suspended over a two burner electrical hot plate. In order to manipulate the paint, you have to keep it in this molten state. You can spend up to $500 buying fancy equipment but I’ve always managed with $5 finds from my local thrift store. See the image to the right.

All painting, that is the brush strokes, dry within a matter of seconds. So it’s really coarse and textural. You have to like that (I do). In comparison to many other media, encaustic is the mother of the “happy accident”. Additionally, or rather in contrast, it’s also quite difficult to manage, to control, to manipulate. There are many unhappy accidents. Realistic subject matter then, is possible, but if so, it’s never refined, which is also OK, as long as you are comfortable with that (I am).

A Piece of Me #33, encaustic on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

I began this series of encaustic panels for the A Piece of Me project with a purely abstract background composition. I reasoned that, for starters, this would be an easy subject matter, good for getting my feet re-wet. And it was. Swift strokes of titanium white to start, then a layer of yellow ochre, covered by another layer of titanium. After the burning in, where you hold a heat lamp (another $5 thrift store find) over the panel for a number of seconds to gently remelt the wax and fuse it to the panel, I decided to add some graphical contrast. I melted a tint of some burnt sienna and applied a quick spray of dots using a tooth brush. Eh voila!

Scale it up, 10 or 20 times and hang it on the wall. There’s your contemporary piece of art. Technical write up of using encaustic for an indirect painting technique here.

A Piece of Me #12, the mixed technique

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I’ve finally reached the last in this series of panels using the mixed technique. This last one, like the one previous to it, was a landscape composition containing elements of background, middle ground and foreground. In this case, the foreground and middle ground were figurative elements: the foreground was a quarter slice of my face; the middle ground contained a number of figures, four distinct ones and miscellaneous body-parts of two others. (Geez, this sounds like a post-mortem.) In addition, since the underpainting for the flesh tones was done in the standard convention of terre verte (green), it even looks ghoulish.

A Piece of Me #12, egg tempera over india ink on collaged substrate.

A Piece of Me, #12. The mixed technique over collage. 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in

So I was interested to render these elements carefully in terms of hue and value. For example, the lady in the centre of the middle-ground had on a very pink shirt in the original photograph. I toned it down because I didn’t want it to attract too much attention. However since my face is strongly lit, I’m wearing a black shirt with an oatmeal coloured coat I wasn’t too worried about the contrasts of the foreground. The only challenge wasto render it well. In the end I’m pretty pleased with the result and of course, the underpainting, underdrawing and collage all play a formative role.

Full description of the whole project here. Write up on the mixed technique here.

A Piece of Me #02, the mixed technique

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After a long, partially self-imposed, partially corona-virus imposed hiatus (no, I was not sick, just stuck for awhile on Gilligan’s Island) – I have finally been able to return to the drawing board in my Bruges studio. Hooray!!!

A Piece of Me #02, the mixed technique. 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #02, egg tempera over underdrawing.

This then, is one of the last panels executed in the mixed technique. The composition for this and the final one (still yet to come) are both challenging and interesting at the same time. They contain elements of a traditional landscape layout, that is, foreground, middle-ground and background. So for me, as a painter, that primarily means I want to control both my chromatic and value contrasts: the foreground can contain the warmest hues and the strongest values; while the middle ground less and the background even less.

Actually during the oil level I rendered each of these elements separately, then balanced them up at the end. The man with the cap in the foreground came last. The figure in the centre (I call him Joe Biden), was a quick fix, following the architectural background, which also happened relatively quickly (due to the work up of my previous layers). My interest has always been in having each panel function on its own as well as having the capacity to integrate itself into the finally completed whole. Due to their landscape elements these panels should be able to do both rather well? So, of course, I’m looking forward to putting it all together at the end!

Full description of the whole project here. Write up on the mixed technique here.

A Piece of Me #27, the mixed technique

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A piece of me #27, the egg tempera underpainting.

A piece of me #27. the mixed technique on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

This panel represented a few challenges mostly due to the very dark shadow of the man’s gray/black pants leg. It’s a strong element, front-and-center, commanding attention. So I wanted to represent it accurately, but also I wanted to depict enough other dark accents surrounding it to encourage the circulation of light (or lack thereof). The ring and the shadow of my linen coat work rather well for that. But is it enough? The shadow is strong and also uniform. So I still may try to introduce some scumbled detail into those deepest leg-shadows after this level dries.

However, that is or will be complicated by another, technical complication. After I had started laying in some very dark gray pigment into the medium/glaze (in the pants leg), I found that the paint dried almost immediately (!) – too quickly to manipulate. In painter’s parlance this is called “sinking in”. This happens when the ground is too absorbent. In this case, I think the absorbency was caused by the combination of the linen fabric that I had glued onto the HDF panel as part of my substrate preparation as well as the siccative nature of the particular pigment (Payne’s Gray) that I had used in that area. “Sinking in” is remedied by a localized treatment of retouch varnish, which I applied before reworking that area yesterday. Though improved, when this area thoroughly dries I still may try to supply more balancing nuance (the scumble mentioned above). However, I am not dissatisfied with the result. I think the treatment of the linen jacket, the tile work upper left, the plaster wall lower left as well as the ringed fingers are delicious. So these are the comments of the-always-critical-chef.

BTW: sorry for the glare – that’s only in the photograph – not the image.

Full description of the whole project here. Write up on the mixed technique here.

A Piece of Me #17, the mixed technique

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A piece of me, #17, the egg tempera underpainting over the india ink underdrawing.

A Piece of Me #17, mixed technique on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 5 1/4 x 8 1/4 in.

This panel was pure painter’s delight. Took me about an hour to do. My challenge: how to make a field of dark green with some slight shadowed undulations interesting

So I mixed up five shades from the deepest shadows to the highest highlights and set to work. And though I did use some lead white for the tints, I was also careful to make use of the white of the gesso substrate, too. This was done by using a fan shaped dry brush to brush the pigmented paint into its neighbor. When the manipulation was vigorous enough the dry brush tended to reveal the substrate – which made the whole panel more luminous. Finding light in the shadows. And relative to the composition, I was careful to introduce whatever hard lines it offered as a counterpoint to the amorphous fields of green. This is the result.

The whole is already more three dimensional than its underpainting. I’ll take it.Full description of the whole project here. Write up on the mixed technique here.

A Piece of Me #52, the mixed technique

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A piece of me #52, egg tempera over collage

A piece of me, #52, the mixed technique over collage on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

One of the most interesting aspects of this particular collaged panel was my pants cuff. It projects a few millimeters from the rest of the composition (!). Really. During the oil level, I found that balancing the warm whites of my pants, socks and the plastered wall with my skin tone was all made possible by the value adjustments inherent to the composition (and the judicious use of a warm-gray pigment from the tube). BTW: I prefer my grays warm and I don’t mix them on the palette. It’s too difficult to consistently achieve an elusive neutrality (which may not exist anyway). Full description of the whole project here. Write up on the mixed technique here.

A Piece of Me #22, the mixed technique

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A piece of me #22, the egg tempera underpainting over pastiglia

A piece of me #22, the mixed technique over pastiglia on panel, 21 x 13.3 or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

This panel was executed over a pre-prepared lightly sculpted pastiglia. On the pastiglia level I tried to create the effect of folds of clothing: the bends of my linen jacket and the flowing shirt of the lady standing behind me to the right. Unfortunately, due to my method of creating the pastiglia, a number of pinholes appeared in the gesso of the linen jacket. The oil was able to hide some, but otherwise it’s not an ideal situation, kinds like acne, you learn to live with the scars. The light jacquard pattern of the lady’s blue blouse was a nice surprise for me as I began to work on the enlarged image. Fun to render! Full description of the whole project here. Write up on the mixed technique here.