Oops-I had a solo exhibition of my imaginary landscape series and never made a blog post about it. Well, you can see the paintings in the Recent Work portfolio section of this site! 

I’ve begun a new series of paintings I’m calling Requiem, based on photographs of deceased people that have had an impact on my life. I really liked the broken, distressed slabs of clay that I used in the Imaginary Landscape series, and leaned into that when making slabs for this new project. I have found deciding on what photo references to use to be  way more difficult than I could have imagined, not to mention deciding who to paint. 

For the first in the series I decided to paint my mother, who died when I was 17 and she was 51. As you can imagine, I have countless photographs I could have worked from, but for some reason I chose literally the very first photo that was ever taken of her, in May of 1927. The photo is of course black and white, and it’s blown out and blurry, but there is something so evocative about the photo I followed my instinct and used it. Here is a work-in-progress shot, sorry it’s on the weird old green cutting mat that’s on my desk. I like the Zoomed in view because you can see how the cracks/texture in the clay work with the painting and there is less of the distracting green mat visible. Of course once it’s finished, I’ll do a better photo of the entire painting. 

The hard thing about imaginary landscapes on clay (see my first post on these) is that it’s so difficult to know when they are “done.” The interaction of translucent paint over the texture of the clay slabs can look so good in the early stages that it’s hard to know if any more is needed. I showed two paintings in the ESU Faculty show this fall that were minimally worked, but I’ve decided to add more to both of them because while I liked them from close up, from a distance they weren’t reading very well. And, as I had worked more and more into other paintings while those two were out of the studio in the faculty show, I decided I liked more layering. My fear had been that the more layers of paint, the less the clay would play an integral role in the painting. But after adding a lot of layers on some of the paintings I realized that the “clay-ness” of the pieces was still playing a big role in the work. 

I need to take more photos, but, here are a few paintings as they are at the moment-the paintings’ progress. 

The primitive and labor-intensive processes of growing dye plants, making natural dye, making pigments including from the natural dye, making paints from the pigments and making clay structures to paint them on took up the bulk of this summer’s residency. Now I’m finally using all those materials! 

Around August first, I started using only oil paint I had made in the residency on the clay slabs, and then tried out the watercolor to tint a pencil drawing I had made of something (I’m not sure what kind of plant it is) growing in the community garden.

After only 3 days of painting, it was pretty clear what was missing; a true brighter, lighter yellow  and a more opaque white. Throughout history, from cave painting onwards, many artists have done amazing work with very restricted palettes such as brown, black and white. The most restrained color palettes, especially monochrome, nearly always use white. Problem is, modern artist paints generally use metals for white. Historically and to this day lead white was used, now mostly titanium and some zinc are used for white. The processes to make the metal paints are just not something I’m NOT going to get into, because of how involved they are, the equipment needed and how potentially toxic it can be. I first tried chalk from champagne, France-a natural white material I had on hand because it was used in the pastel and gouache paints I made. I quickly learned why chalk is used to make pastel and gouache-it’s almost transparent. If you add chalk to a paint or pastel, it changes the texture and working properties, but what you see is not so much the chalk but whatever the pigment’s color-blue, red, yellow etc. The chalk just wasn’t opaque enough. Making my own set of paints, and using them, has given me an appreciation of what is essential and what isn’t. I'm using far fewer colors, and it's frankly pretty interesting how far these few homemade paints can go. 

I plan to solve the white dilemma with white clay for white. I know white clay used to be mined from this area, and hopefully I’ll eventually be able to find some local white clay. With the residency over and fall classes almost here, I’m going to cry uncle and “cheat” with some commercially made white until I can make a white from clay. 

When it comes to the true yellow, I’m confident I can do this myself with natural, local materials. I have some dried weld that Marla grew for me in her dye garden, and weld is one of those dye plants that was historically used to make lake pigments. I’ve made lake pigments before, and I’m hoping to just make do with the garden gold until I can make pigment from the weld. At this point I haven’t cheated and used any commercially made yellow paint.

I’m really enjoying exploring the imaginary landscape idea with my homemade natural paints on the clay slabs. I work on a bunch at a time, working on each a little each day, building up the colors. I do of course mix the colors, but I also use layers of translucent paint, where one layer is dry before I add the next layer. The layers are thin so I don’t lose the texture and properties of the clay slabs. The weight of the clay, the physicality is important. They are not images on a “blank” white picture plane. I’m not trying to illustrate a landscape, but to allude to one. 

It’s hard to know when these paintings are “done.” I put two in the ESU faculty show that are so minimal that it was hard for me to accept they were finished. The show opens the first day of the semester, August 29, at the Dunning Gallery on NCC’s Monroe campus. There are paintings in progress in my studio that already have much more paint on them than the two in the show, but they are not “done” yet because to me they just aren’t doing everything they need to do as a painting. When a painting gets to a point where it doesn’t need anything-where if you did anything more it would make it worse-it’s done. The art is figuring out when you are at that point!