Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Primary Trilogy


It took a long time to get these three finished. The Red and Yellow paintings were done in 2009 but I only just finished the Blue painting two weeks ago. They will be shown at the upcoming Student/Faculty show at Carrollwood Cultural Center.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

TOTAL DISASTER!

After about a week at home touching base with my life and work I decided to apply an egg wash to the painting I did at the workshop. Who knows what happened but the egg wash didn't go on properly, it puddled into thickish spots of brownish yellow goop that didn't bleach out in the sun. I have finished all my ET paintings this way and never had this kind of problem. The more I tried to fix it the worse it became. The painting was ruined. I was devasted!

I thought I'd have to throw it out and begin again, but I decided to experiment, based on Koo's advice that "there are very few problems that can not be fixed in Egg Tempera", so I plunged ahead and sanded off the several coats of gluey egg wash removing some of the background color in the process. There were several bare spots down to the gesso panel showing when I set up to fix the mess.

I spent all day on Sunday working on the painting. I couldn't duplicate the color of the background so I changed to a new color that I had ordered in dispersion form from Natural Pigments, Maya Blue...a lovely grey blue color. I cut new masks and out of acetate this time and could control the sponge a bit better this time. Practice, practice, practice.....she makes it look so easy. After about 20 more paintings I'll have it down.

Anyway, here is the revised painting. Perhaps a bit better? I love it still, but am afraid to seal it off with another egg wash. This one will probably just go under plastic glazing as is. It appears to be a little dark in this blog, but you get the idea.

Celebration of the Egg (Revised)