Tag Archives: artist living in Bruges Belgium

A Piece of Me #58, encaustic

A Piece of Me#58, underdrawing in pen and ink.

A Piece of Me #58, encaustic over pastiglia on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

Ah, one of my favourite spontaneous compositions: the cigarette butt. I remember when I first started laying out the design for this panel, I had to ask myself, what is that? When I realised it was a cigarette butt I had to laugh. Who knew?

It turned out that the treatment for this panel called for pastiglia. Ha! So I had the opportunity to sculpt this inconspicuous little guy, wondering how that 3D element would play into the final assemblage.

Then I realised that the painting method was encaustic, which is a bit of a double whammy, since the burning-in (the melting in) phase can enhance any substrate dimensionality. Which it did. The paint receded just slightly around the form, accentuating it. No harm. No foul.

Otherwise, the painting consisted of three planes of reduced earth colors, accentuated by a few strong accents of almost-black. Like the panel from yesterday, it was another foreground piece, so I felt could afford the strong accents.

Two hours of work. One and done. Technical write up of using encaustic for an indirect painting technique here.

A Piece of Me #63, encaustic

A Piece of Me #08, encaustic

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

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!