After Petra added her watercolor I felt the paintings had reached a point where the physical application of the personas as tools in their creation had been maxed out. It was now time to assert myself more forcibly onto the picture plane.
I would do this by returning not just to oil paint but to the black and white palette which has re-emerged as a dominate part of my painting over the past 18 months. This would be a good place for a quick recap - links to previous postings in black and white - from oldest to most recent.
Looking at the development of the collage-painting Good Witches of the Between, Part Two (February 2017) in the end the layers of color become buried beneath glazes in blacks and whites. During the same period the paintings of Patchwork Surface moved from colorful, quilt-like beginnings to paintings with solid forms in mostly black and white tones and a smattering of color here and there. Interesting to note, this spring I dug out those paintings from the studio rack and began taking another look at them. Some I had continued to add colorful glazes to over the Summer/Fall 2017, others just lingered on the shelf. The colorful ones I hung on a red wall to look at some more.
Three I joined together to form a single, long, rectangular painting. It hangs on a wall in the greenhouse.
You might recognize the top panel in this 'new' painting as the source for the first painting Franzi and Petra physically participated in (March 2017), One Painting Three.
The next iteration of Good Witches of the Between, Part Four also tended towards dominant black and white, though some of Petra's more muted tones are contained within. Oddly, this Fall Franzi, after a previous intervention, claimed the canvas for himself and now it is blue.
Franzi is not the only one to over-paint older canvases. During the first half of 2017 I re-worked six 8 x 10 inch canvas I had originally painted in Fall 2013 into black and white (with a bit of collage) compositions. This work is found in the postings Three small asides and Three more small asides.
With Concertinaed and Elegy black and white began to play a greater, perhaps unifying, role in the visual organization and development of the works in which the personas were applied as tools. In Concertinaed Franzi's blue dominates, but the white space surrounding the blue shapes and the remnants of Petra's frottage and black watercolor washes lend themselves to creating additional, visual depth. Elegy, as its name suggests, is a darker work, a lament. Here even Franzi's blue is submerged in the darkness of the non-cradled side of the multi-panel painting. Still, shapes of varying whiteness and lightness find their place in the darker 'oily' side of the panels. The cradled side of the panels, with their un-primed wood and watercolor and thinned gesso flowing forms and washes is the opposite of yet the same as the non-cradled side.
The next double-sided multi-panel painting, Signs Left Behind, emerged from the sketchbook Deciphering Elegy, and is also a predominantly black and white painting. This small 'study' - it only consists of four 6 x 6 inch panels, was followed by 'the work yet to be titled' and as of this writing not quite finished. The intention behind the colors and shapes of this painting was to make a double-sided, multi-paneled painting playing with figure-ground in a simplified composition but not being too black and white, instead aiming for the gray area in between. However, this work is not complete and once I have the steel bases for the paintings next week this may change. I may add an additional layer or two of black glaze to the shapes.
This ends the recap of black and white and brings me back to this post and my takeover of the paintings with layers of black and white oil paint.
In approaching these paintings I knew Franzi's blue acrylic areas would remain prominent to the composition and the qualities of their 'acrylic-ness' would or could standout or be underplayed depending on how I chose to work with the oil paint. I also knew I wanted to maintain a transparency when the work is viewed up close -so that areas of the original inkjet printed paper, Petra's watercolor, and edges of Franzi's blue, might shine thru but also have the shapes read as solids from a distance. I knew the underlying colors would impact the black and white glazes sitting on top. With this knowledge I decided to begin using a thin layer of zinc white paint thinned with Liquin. I then applied a thin layer of asphaltum black also thinned with Liquin. The next layer of white I added marble dust to the Liquin and tube pigment to give a matte finish. The black shapes would maintain a semi-gloss finish. The blue acrylic areas vary. As I built up the layers I switched the pigments from a zinc to a titanium white and from asphaltum to mars black. The later pigments are less transparent by nature but by keeping the layers very thin I was able to achieve the balance between transparency and solidity I sought.
What follows are process pics. In the next post I will post images of just the paintings with no text. I mounted the paintings onto 11 x 14 inch canvas wrapped MDF boards. I liked the flatness of the paintings and wanted to maintain the thinness while making the work a bit more solid which is why I chose not to mount onto the deeper birch wood panels I've recently worked with. Aside from determining the configuration of the panels upon installation - and a better title - these paintings are 'finished'.