"It's Grief," Part Two
Every Good Painting Hangs on a Good Composition
The second triptych for the performance piece “it’s Grief” at the end of today’s studio session.
Below is a link to the FB live stream video in which studio assistant and owner of Rockport, Maine’s Action Art Gallery Kristen Eckmann and I discuss the process of making sure the composition for the second triptych in my "It's Grief" performance piece is sound before applying oil paint. You can view our FB live stream video here.
We drew the composition for this 4’ x 10’ triptych with soft and hard charcoal, as I’ve always done for oil paintings. The next step would normally be to “fix” the charcoal (this means applying turpentine over the drawing to “fix” the charcoal so that it can’t smudge and mix with the underpainting that comes next, or with the final coats of oil paint). This would normally be done by applying plain turpentine over every part of the drawing. Then once that dries, an underpainting done with oil paint and turps would be done, followed by additional layers of paint using progressively thicker mediums, known as painting “fat over lean.” However, due to health issues, I can no longer inhale the large amounts of turps fumes that would result should I fix the charcoal drawing as I would normally do. As a result, I’m experimenting with fixing the drawing and doing the underpainting with acrylic paint to avoid the issue of the turpentine fumes.
I got a little ahead of myself and began applying some acrylic paint before the composition was settled, the consequence of my ill-advised enthusiasm being that it’s going to take more than one work session devoted to correcting that mistake, since I got a little carried away. Luckily, the mistake was only in one part of the composition, but once we looked at the big compositional picture, we realized that many more changes needed to be made.
Some of them simply involved adjusting the scale of various parts of the image, some were painting over things that shouldn’t have been added during my little painting frenzy, and some were the result of making a change in one area that affected things in other areas of the composition, requiring more reworking.
You think it's finally done, the grieving. You think there are no pieces of your shattered heart left to break. You think you have no more tears, no more painful moaning. No more wild howling in the night for those you still love But can no longer see. Or hear. Or touch.