A Piece of Me #56, egg tempera over pastiglia on panel, 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

Here on the left is the first in a long 64 part series, now officially “off the press”. A full description of the whole project is on my companion wordpress web-blog site, atelierartisanal.com. So in all these panels I want to create a painting – interesting and hopefully beautiful in its own right – separate from any recognizable form either I or the viewer might want to impose.  These are then, all abstract paintings (which in fact are based on close-up sections of a photograph). Thus aesthetically, I am trying to pay attention to: composition (the play of light and the tensions inherent to the already given shapes); color (the contrasts and relations of hues); paint (areas of opacity and translucency); texture (the tactile qualities of the paint, collage, or pre-sculpting); value (highlights, shadows and everything in-between). And though I am interested in reproducing the original image, I’m not interested in absolute fidelity (as, for example, a Photorealist might be). Dissonances can and should arise. Therefore, most designs are transposed free hand – not mechanically. And relative to this image, you can read more about the low-relief sculpting process of pastiglia here.

A technical write up of the lessons learned about egg tempera in this series of panels here.