Here's a new piece I will be showing in a group show called Encyclopedia Botanica at Arch Enemy Arts in Philadelphia.
The Process:
Here's the original idea when it struck while I was at a bar, remembering a dream I had of wading through piles of flower heads. I realized this was an image I really wanted to paint, and that it is kind of ridiculous that I haven't been painting my dreams more often all along. I told my boyfriend (fellow painter Anthony Palumbo) and he said "The best artists are the ones who make you dream bigger." A moment of intense inspiration... I felt like maybe I could make paintings that could do that, or in any case it's what I should be trying to do.
Next step: I did some tiny value studies on toned paper. I do them really tiny so that I can do a bunch of them very quickly and try out a lot of different options.
Then I did a couple of acrylic color studies. These are about 2 inches tall, so I'm still working very small. I taped off the edges with artists' tape, which by the way will rip fibers off of soft watercolor paper (in this case it was some kind of sandy-colored hot press Rives paper) and possibly rip into your painting as it did on the left edge of the first piece. Maybe do a coat of matte medium over the paper before you tape it off... The color studies are not that different from each other, I guess because I already had an idea of the color space I wanted. Which was "Really Effing Pink."
Here are the colors I used: Mauve, Quinacridone Violet, Primary Magenta, Brilliant Pink, Shell Pink, Compose Green, and Compose Blue No. 1, plus the non-pictured Phthalo Turquoise and Titanium White.
Then I got a gessoed masonite board out and started applying acrylics to it, same colors as the little studies.
After the initial block-in I collected reference, from fashion photos of models walking down a runway to the maned wolf to peony trees. It had to be peonies, because one of their meanings in Victorian times was anger, and in Asia they're also popular as tattoos and are associated with organized crime, and I wanted to have a slightly threatening undercurrent... That's more for my own satisfaction, but I still wanted to have that symbolism. I needed peonies to shoot reference photos myself, but it being early spring, they aren't in season and I had to call around and wait a few days for a florist to get some in. I tried to get some at a huge flower convention that happened to be going in town just then but no one there had any peonies, just seeds... Internet photos worked well enough for a block-in while I waited to get my hands on some real ones though, and in the process of collecting photos I found ultraviolet photography of trees that had exactly the otherworldly feel I wanted for the background. No green leaves here.
I also needed some specifically weird lighting, and friends weren't available to model because I wanted the head reference that very night and it was already late, so I pulled out some Paperclay I had sitting around and sculpted a little head and shot reference using that.
Here's a picture Tony shot of me working on this, after calling my painting clothes my "Axl Rose Costume." You can see my various reference images taped up on a board on my easel behind the painting.
The final acrylic underpainting:
Here's where I switched to oil, using this palette. I did a study of a peony bud first to try out some of the paints which were new to me. On the palette: Cobalt Violet, Ultramarine Red Pink, Alizarin, Brilliant Rose, Radiant Magenta, Radiant Red, Shell Pink, Titanium White, Naples Yellow, Yellow Gray, Yellow Ochre Light, Cinnibar, Radiant Turquoise, Misty Blue, Cadmium Turquoise Light, Phthalo Green, and a little touch of Cadmium Red in the middle there. I ended up never touching some of the greens in the bigger painting though, and added Quinacridone Magenta and subsequently used a *lot* of it.
It was also at this point that I went to NYC to see the Jeffrey Catherine Jones exhibit at Society of Illustrators and was feeling really inspired to let things be a lot looser in the background that I had ever dared before. Every one of his paintings used a different technique, whatever worked to get the effect he wanted, so I kept saying to myself "There's no wrong way!"
In-progress detail of the face:
At this point I thought I was pretty much done, but Tony told me he thought the wolf and the girl's right hand could use another pass, and that the wolf's eyes looked too red compared to the rest of the painting. (Colors are a bit sunken in in the photo)
So I slept on it, and decided the right answer to the red wolf eyes was not to change the eye color which I liked, but to redden up the background trees. They had looked redder in some of my phone photos anyway and I liked how it looked, so I glazed some Indian yellow over the pink. I went back into the wolf and rendered the fur out a bit more, and let his body merge with the background to let the figure pop out more. Again, I thought it was now done, but asked for another set of eyes, this time from my friend Mia Araujo. She mentioned a little confusion as to the construction of the woman's dress and made me realize I needed to push the dress further into impossibility because what I was going for was something that wasn't physically possible, a dream garment that morphs from being almost a tattoo, to fabric, to actual flowers...
So I worked on it another time before finally being finished. Here's the final again, after being varnished and properly photographed :) Click to see a large version!
This is such a stunning piece. One of my new favourites of yours. I really like the bold use of red and pink tones, very powerful.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much! I went crazy for pink on this one :D
DeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteStunning piece of artwork.
ReplyDeleteI really liked this part of the article, with a nice and interesting topics have helped a lot of people who do not challenge things people should know.. You need more publicize this so many people who know about it are rare for people to know this... Success for you.....!!!
ReplyDeleteI am so stunned with this. I googled "pionies" and this came up. I don´t even know how to call it. I feel a strong connection to your painting. Thank you for painting it.
ReplyDelete