Across two panels, buildings are drawn against a shifting sky. Yellow light hits the buildings from the sun at the horizon. Light blues and purples imply dawn. This dawn, and the dark purple clouds on the left, suggest a time of change. The diagonal of the horizon, and slope of the roofs, add instability to the perspective — alternately, the angle causes the eye to race towards the right, just as the clouds in they sky are racing in.

Beneath the buildings — or maybe, the floors of the buildings — are fields. The horizon has distant trees that catch the emerging sunlight. As the image progresses left to right, the buildings gain form, moving into three dimensions, while also losing their solidity and merging with the sky.

Table of Contents

• Reflection
  • On section and process
• Inspirations
  • Wayne Thiebaut
• Ideation
• Planning
  • Testing
• Process
  • Acrylic Base Layer
  • Chunky Sky
  • Avoiding Realism
  • Final Panels
• Supplementary Material
  • Reflection: Deconstructing Pastels
  • Student Collaboration Round 2
• Bibliography

Reflection

On All That’s Solid Melts Into Air

• Is this a Diptych? I guess so. I see them as one piece, not two, with a 10-20cm space between.
• Although photography adds a challenge, to conveying these pieces, I’m very glad we have digital submissions. Packing these up and shipping across the atlantic would be a challenge I don’t want to imagine.
• I was able to get away from realism in this piece, which I utterly failed in the ‘expressive landscape’ exercise.
• Leveraging a variety of ways to apply paint was a great deal of fun, and gave me access to different shapes and expectations. Sponge rollers, silicon wedges, palette knives, foam fruit wrappers, and oil sticks all do different things from brushes. Ironically they forced me to loosen up and get more relaxed, even as they also lead me further into line.
• I can see how Denyse Thomasos has influenced this particular work. I had been thinking of Wayne Thiebault, and I can see some influence there but perhaps not as much as I had initially planned. I also see some Amadeo de Souza-Cardosa — in particular A Clear House

• Looking at the line of the houses gets me thinking about Richard Serra, and ‘Shift’ in particular — a sculpture not too far from where I live, though inaccessible. Its the linear interaction with the smoothly rolling landscape that is drawing a parallel in my mind.

• I was worried about how coherent the two panels would look, side by side, as I couldn’t work on them in that configuration. My easel could only hold one panel at a time, and I couldn’t even put the second panel beside the easel. There was a lot of very physical swapping back and forth — always in terror of smearing the paint in the process. I’m quite pleased that they do indeed fit together.
• The areas I like least are:
  • The floor-field of the large right hand building. I want the building to have its own incongruous space, but this doesn’t quite work as it moves above the horizon.
  • The roof shapes of the partial building on the far-right. I had redone this a few times, as I had produced unsuccessful shapes/colour combinations in my first few passes. I’m okay with the final result, but not happy with it.

On Section, and Process

• I attended a BAPT open session with the program leader for the degree. They made some comments which anchored some of my past research/activities into their purpose. Paraphrasing, they said that it isn’t so much that we’re doing the research, or doing the exercises, but we’re considering how to incorporate that learning into our art — or discarding it with intention as the case may be.
• Landscape
  • Is not my thing, but I think that is more a familiarity problem than an interest problem. I want to get better with landscape, but I default to working with the human figure when I’m relaxing.
  • Much of this section turned into experimentation around process, rather than thinking about composition and creating interesting works.
• Acrylics vs Oils
  • I brought Acrylics into this section
    • Acrylics dry fast, very fast, but seem to have a colour shift that I don’t perceive in oils. Oil colours have a ‘gem like’ quality when I use transparent paint. Acrylics don’t do that — perhaps if I mixed in with a gloss medium?
    • From a process perspective, working the lower layers in acrylic was hugely advantageous. It let me work, and rework very quickly and hone into my idea in a way that I haven’t been able to with oils yet.
• Going back
  • What I’ve learned this section makes me want to go back and re-do Flat Packed Scissors. I feel like I’ve progressed my paint handling, and can re-address what I was trying to achieve in that assignment.
• Working Big
  • I often work small, probably out of lack of confidence. But this also forces a limitation in brush sizes, as I can’t “get small” from an already small surface. Working big lets me have a vastly wider variety of marks, and space for colour.
  • I need to rethink my space if I’m going to work big. My workspace has a lot of stuff in it, from all my various materials, so if I work big I’m going to have to reorganize.
  • Bigger is also slower. It takes a lot of time to paint a large surface, and I need to plan for that.
  • I have no where in my house with good enough space for both, and enough light to photograph large multi-part pieces.
• What is my art
  • Obviously, no answers nor any need to immediately define. But I’ve spent a lot of time this section reading websites, working on contextual understanding, and listening to podcasts.
  • Particularly with the Denyse Thomasos exhibit write-up, and my various readings that came with that, I have been thinking about what themes and ideas resonate with me.
  • Reading through Thomasos’ process as it relates to racialized oppression did get me thinking about my own queerness/”membership” in a minority, and the intersectional interplay with my being white male.

Inspiration: Wayne Thiebaut

Thiebaut’s landscapes are fascinating to me. When I first saw them online they reminded me of textiles.

I think pulling ideas from his style would be interesting in this assignment, especially so given my earlier sketches as part of the fourth project of this section.

What I wish to take from these:

• There a balance between solid colour, and line. It isn’t quite the golden ratio by canvas area, but it is close.
• Generally, the colour fields are bright and intense, while the line work is dark.
• There are two types of linework:
  • The rivers, and field dividers, seem to carry the eye around.
  • The crop rows play against perspective. In some (such as in Levee Farms) they seem to create paintings-within-paintings when they have their own horizon lines.

Ideation

• Idea began with the view of the sky between two houses across the street from my home. Sometimes, depending on the sky, it can look like this cleft of sky has moved into the foreground and the houses moved to the background.
• Listening to the Modern Art Notes podcast, the phrase “All That’s Solid Melts into Air”, from Marx’s communist manifesto, came up. This phrase was used by Marx as part of a larger passage as a reference to how the stable structures of the past have been wiped away in the current era, and even new forms are discarded before they can entrenched.
• This got me into thinking about ecological impacts of current western societies, and how I live close to one the last remaining areas of the Oak Savannah in Ontario — a biome that would have occupied my neighbourhood a couple hundred years ago. Specifically, I was thinking about how society flattens the land around us.

Planning

The idea for this assignment came together during project 5. You can see some of the ideas forming during the sketchbooking.

I really like the black line looping approach at left, above, but didn’t end up using as I hadn’t figured out how to work with the paint properly. Towards the final layers of the assignment I did get to the mix I would have wanted, so maybe in future I will try this.

From Assignment 3,

• One area I really liked was creating an underlayer of colour which came through between the edges of my brush strokes. I’m thinking I’ll create acrylic layers in this assignment which will serve the same purpose.
• Second, in the face I tried to keep my brushwork roughly radiating outward from the eye. I want to do something similar in the sky of this piece, radiating outward from the ‘dawn’ alleyway on the right of the composition.

Content Inspiration

From my front porch, my street curves away in two directions. The houses are all a weird conglomeration of styles from the last hundred years. The snow and sky blend together, making the snow seem like holes in landscape looking straight out to the horizon.

My idea, here, is dawn or sunset rising up in the alleyway between houses. The houses are roughly worked in with transparent lines in blue, purple and orange, reminiscent of Wayne Thibaut’s work. The houses are, however, simply gaps in the landscape. Places where the land has been flattened and erased.

Around here, I’d decided to create a piece in two parts. They’re not physically connected, but does this still qualify as being a diptych? The major through-lines of the perspective are carefully rules in so that the paintings visually connect when spaced about 10-15 cm apart. Inclusive of this gap, the total piece will be around 190cm wide x 60cm tall.

From Thiebaut:

• The major lines of the houses will be the “eye guiding” lines.
• Within the houses, various triangles and squares will break the perspective and have lighter toned treatments — whether solid colour, or applied through line.
• Bright colours.

Additionally:

• Colours outside the buildings will be stronger, or more detailed. Lines thicker.
• Colours within the buildings should trend more neutral, or more bright white.
  • I want to try to make the buildings look like ‘lenses’ on the background, or thin masks, rather than physical imposing constructs. Perhaps I do this with glazes?

I’m my colour sketch, I outline the panels with a green. Although that was coincidental, I’m now thinking I may paint the sides of the work with a dark green.

Testing

I am very interested in getting a washed/cloudy look to the under layers of my painting. For this I was thinking of mixing some very watery acrylics. Above, I tried applying with rags. There are some aspects of it I like, but the hard edges are not desirable.

• Will the looseness of this mix compromise the stability of the acrylic layer once dry? I’ll need to be careful about how I interact with the surface.

• After working with oil sticks to get a feel for what I can do (red/blue lines, left) I found the tactile experience to be somewhat familiar to my work in dry media. I realized I likely wouldn’t be able to use the oil stick on my small study panels due to the chunkiness/impact of the surface texture.
• This led me to experiment with paint mixtures that might give me the same feel, while applied by brush.
  • Right side of the above: 7 mixes of paint+medium(or thinner), +1 of just paint from the tube. All painted with same brush, with the same amount of paint on the brush (or best I could do).
  • In each case, same amount of medium added to the paint (to the best I could do).
  • In order: refined linseed, Rublev Medium No.1( thickened linseed+spike oil), safflower, solvent free gel, solvent free fluid, Rublev impasto putty, gamsol
• I found both the refined linseed, and the solvent free gel to have the right ‘feel’, though the refined linseed mix seemed to carry further along the canvas before it gave out to the dry brush effect. This directly led into the final painting in Working From Photographs

Although I won’t use it in this assignment, the impasto putty with a wide bristle brush was really interesting. It reminded me of Aaron Westerberg’s work, specifically another study of his that I have. As I’m (too slowly) getting more comfortable in the medium, I’m looking at how and when I might apply this effect.

• Trying out some ideas on smaller panels. This posed some problems as this was a canvas panel and so had a texture that the large birch panels did not.
  • From the above:
    • I was going to try “hatching” the sky in. I quickly decided this wasn’t what I wanted to do.
    • Painting in the space of the buildings reminded me of my Tutor’s words: Painting for the sake of painting. This evolved, in the final panels, to attempting to give enough ‘wall’ so there is a level of form, but wasn’t completely blocked in. This let me reveal the acrylic underlayers up.

Process

Many steps in the process and testing happened in parallel. I’d settle on one step, and apply to the final panels. While doing so, I began testing for the next step. This may make this blog entry seem a bit disjointed.

Problems

I clearly didn’t prime the board properly, as the gesso is lifting. I wonder if I sanded the wood too smooth for proper adhesion? Given this is happening, if I’m going to layer oils on top, I have to make sure I have good coverage on my acrylic layers.

• Chose to roll some titanium back over the blue to both tone it down, and cover some areas where the gesso had detached. Hopefully this will help strengthen the surface ahead of oil painting.

Acrylic Base Layer

The under painting is quite busy. I’m going to have to consider this as I think about the treatment of the upper layers. At this point, I’m debating between chunky brushstrokes (such as from Assignment 3), or something more organically applied (such as rags?) in the sky. I’ve deviated from the solid luminous colour spaces in Thiebaut’s work, but that is fine.

Up close the texture created by this method of application is quite interesting. It reminds me of foliage, which might be an avenue to approach the backgrounds of more tree-based landscapes. I like how the acrylics allows me this, and I’m thinking about how and where I want to preserve this in the final painting.

What would I need to do to shift this technique into oils? It might add a very interesting layer of luminosity. I might try this on a experiment panel, though it will likely destroy the roller — luckily those are cheap.

Chunky Sky

• With my initial idea that the sky sometimes fights for foreground with the buildings, I wanted to make the sky quite three dimensional.
• As I was painting, a storm was blowing in. I found myself responding to the racing clouds as I painted, despite this not really being part of my plan.
• I enjoyed the energy of this painting method.

Close Ups

Avoiding Realism

• I like the trees hiding along the skyline.
• Some things to fix once this layer has set up:
  • Sunrise needs a bit of a fix up. What are those red blorps?
  • The right hand building turned a bit messy and I want to fix that up.

Final Panels

Trying to photograph these panels suggests to me that I need to make friends with a photographer.

I struggled here, and repainted it a few times. Oddly, I really like the door on the right.

Reflection: Deconstructing Pastel

Following prompting by my tutor around texture, and my comfort level with dry pastel, I spent some time doing some initial interrogation of my process, and looking into the history of pastel. the full write-up can be found here: Deconstructing Pastel

Student Collaboration Round 2: Collide

Round 2 of the ROW collaboration has started. Although the group won’t meet until after I’ve submitted this assignment, here was my submission to the second round.

The write up can be found here: Student Collaboration: Visual Broken Telephone

Bibliography

Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx (1969) Manifesto of the Communist Party February 1848. Translated by Samuel Moore (s.l.): Progress Publishers.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast No. 585: Matthew Ritchie (Jan 19, 2023) Directed by Tyler Green 67m. At: https://manpodcast.com/portfolio/no-585-matthew-ritchie/