The painting continues.
A while back I decided to start painting again. Most of my life's work was destroyed when huge flooding hit the town, and the sewer systems backed up. You can't recover that which has literally drowned in cack.
It's been a good thing. A few years back I met this Russian dude who painted in the Classical Realist technique. He kind of looks like T-Bird in The Crow, but he rocks on the canvas, and I bought his training materials and spent some time discussing technique with him.
My first piece is a rose. It's taken some months. The canvas needs time to thoroughly dry - about seven weeks a layer. And I had the whole divorce/move/move back trip that cut into my time. So between the first and second and now the third - well, a matter of nine months. But the next layer will start two or so weeks from now.
I'm using paints that have been ground in walnut oil. Vassari suggested that one back in the day, saying that walnut oil gives the paint a beautiful, luscious appearance. I agree. The rose is roughly blocked in in rich velvety sepia tones I'll blend back to reality in the next few layers.
I like rich. Rich food, rich smell, rich taste. And oil paint has a wonderful quality - it's actually transparent and gets more transparent with age. Velasquez once decided he didn't like where a horse's legs were, and painted them over. Within a few years, he had a painting with an eight legged horse.
But if you paint in layers, and get the layers right, the light goes through the layers and comes back, like multiple layers of stained glass, a complex colour and wavefront you just can't get doing a once-over in alla prima.
When people look at the gorgeousnes of an antique oil painting, they're really grooving on that light interplay. And I'm adding to that body of work.
Photos don't do it justice. I'm loving it already.
Next: nudes. Any volunteers?