On underpainting

The colour in the previous post’s pics is the watercolour and gouache underpainting. Once I’ve done something similar to the Piero one, I’ll start on the oil glazes for all three.

The idea is to build up layers of transparent colour (except for the gouache). In the finished painting, the light passes through these transparent layers and reflects off the white ground, giving it an inner glow.

Traditionally, you’d use oil paint diluted with turps for the underpainting. The reason for using turps is Rubens’ principle of ‘fat over lean’, where you put layers with more oil content over layers with less (to prevent cracking). The problem is that different pigments have different amounts of oil added to them to make oil paint, which complicates this process considerably.

My solution is to avoid the problem and use watercolours instead. Needless to say, they have no oil content. I then only have to worry about the glazes. That’s bad enough. I’m quite capable of getting horribly confused.

The other aspect of underpainting where I depart from tradition is the choice of colour. Traditionally, you’d use monochrome, usually in grey (called grisaille), or complementary colours. So in the latter case you’d underpaint the sky orange and the grass red, etc. As you can see, I do neither.

The copies of copies

I'm quite enjoying these crappy photos.

The original copies

These are the two Picabias I'm currently ripping off. Woman with idol is the one on the right of the top pic.

What I like is that I'm doing copies of copies. Woman with idol was based on a picture in a 40s porn magazine, with the doctor in the original replaced by the idol. Adoration of the calf is based on a photo in a surrealist magazine.

The Piero I'm ripping off could also be classed as a copy, given that the dotted lines from the pouncing are still visible. Pouncing is the method Renaissance artists used to transfer drawings from a cartoon on to a wall to be frescoed.

Bollocks to that

Last week, I took down the few comic pages I’d drawn up from the studio wall and put them away. I’d found the first draft, read through it, and thought about it for a bit. I hadn’t been enjoying doing it anyway. It was boring and tedious, and I wasn’t that happy with the result. After reading through the whole thing for the first time in a while, I decided I needed to go back and start again from scratch, with a totally different approach, at some unspecified future date.

Instead, I thought I’d do some fun paintings, copies of things I want to have on the wall. So I’ve whipped up a quick black square (see previous post), and now I’m working on a couple of Picabias and a Piero. They’re straight copies. The differences are the size (25 x 29 cm), the treatment (the old watercolour and oil glazes bizzo), and the words in large letters on the top of each image. These are ‘society’ for Picabia’s Adoration of the calf, ‘cubism’ for his Woman with idol, and ‘surrealism’ for the dog and castle from Piero’s fresco in the Tempio Malatesta.

Black square

Exquisite corpses

The immortals

Heresy and sorcery

To think differently than is customary is much less the result of a better understanding than the result of strong inclinations, of separative, mocking, and perhaps perfidious inclinations. Heresy is the compensation for sorcery, and is not at all innocent or even venerable in itself. In short, I don't like Sunday, which is not a holiday but a day of totalitarian boredom.

Dada school

I first discovered dada when I was 12 or 13. I was in my first year of boarding school and not enjoying it very much. I went to Nelson fucking College. An indication of their pathetic aspirations comes from the school colours: light blue and dark blue, just like Oxford and Cambridge. (It impresses the Blenheim farmers.) I came from a nice liberal middle class family, and that kind of hideously authoritarian environment was a bit of a shock.

Cos I came from a city, I was put into a dorm with all the other city kids. The others had pretty much all been sent to the school cos their parents couldn't handle them. We were the punk rock dorm. Peter and the Test Tube Babies were a particular favourite. At the end of the year, it turned out most of the dorm was involved in a cannabis ring. I didn't know anything about it of course.

We used to go to war with the other dorms. If you drop a light bulb vertically, it'll bounce. We'd start by drop-kicking a bulb into the opposing side, then charge swinging pillow cases with knots tied in the end. Some of the more unscrupulous of us would put coins in the knot.

Boarding school is a funny place. They have stupid rules for stupid rules' sake. You can't walk on the grass, just so it can be a privilege for seventh formers to do so. They'd pick suitable seventh formers to be prefects. Suitable in this context means being not too bright, with a conventional mindset, an uncritical attitude, and an emphasis on physical strength ... you get the idea.

One time, the prefect in charge of our dorm heard us talking after lights out. He barged in and demanded we tell him who it was. When nobody owned up, or would rat anyone else out, he got really angry. We all had to get out of bed and go out on to the front field in our pyjamas. This was in the middle of winter. Then we had to stand there with arms outstretched making small circles with our hands. Try it sometime. It fucking hurts after a while. And that was just the start of it. I'm pleased to say that no-one did rat anyone out no matter what was thrown at us.

I have a line: The only things boarding school taught me were a healthy disrespect for authority and the ability to lie glibly. I've lost the latter due to lack of use, but there's not much chance of that for the former!

I didn't have many books to read, so I would read the Encyclopedia Britannica they had. I'd find an interesting article and then follow the cross-references (analogue hyperlinks!). I can't remember what the original article was, but one led me to both anarchism and dada. Needless to say, at that time and in those circumstances, both appealed to me a lot, but especially dada.

Can't Play Won't Play homage to Picabia

I've just added a homage to Picabia to Can't Play Won't Play's myspace page. That's Mr Stephen Rowe on vocals, reading from a selection of Mr Francis Picabia's Poems and drawings of the daughter born without a mother, written in 1918 and dedicated 'to all neurological doctors in general and especially to' the three doctors who'd recently helped him with his neurasthenia and opium addiction. Picabia wrote the book after one of his doctors wouldn't let him paint cos it was interfering with the treatment too much.

My favourite line is 'That business in the local train would darken', which is a reference to Duchamp's clandestine rendezvous in a railway station with Picabia's wife Gabrielle Buffet for a few hours in August 1912. (Duchamp and Buffet would live together for a while in 1920 after Buffet gave Picabia the flick.)