Sunday, September 6, 2009

Figgy Fiber (or 'Another Still Life that is a bit too Still')

This is 9" x 12" on a base of beveled museum board. I glued a thready, fibery-looking piece of crumpled rice tissue paper onto it, using Colourfix primer as the "glue". I put another coat of primer on, once the "glue" coat was dry.

The underpainting was gouache, big flat color areas, no value, no modeling, no complicated thoughts at all. See below. (NB: I am beginning to consider this mindless underpainting as the way that I can invade the blank white page with some confidence. Like, hey, if I am going to practically cover it all over anyway, what's the harm? It seems to provide me a nice comfortable open door to the work.)

In any event, on Too Still here I used about 99.5% panpastels, fixed twice during the process with SpectraFix, and then just a few touches of softies at the very end.

The figs I bought at Wagshal's, which usually has great local produce. In this case, the figs taste awful. And I love figs! But they were photogenic and so I did break out the big camera and make some nice reference pix.

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