At Last

The first two paintings of 2009. Oh, what is it about January? I have sketched, plotted, traced, laid out on canvas and not dipped a brush into paint until yesterday. And these two paintings are in actuality experiments as they are on a gesso canvas instead of a watercolor canvas.

It was quite a different painting experience. And I wanted at first to force them to look like my other paintings. But gesso is not absorbent so paint behaves differently. And as most gesso prepared canvases are for acrylic or oil paintings it has a coarser tooth. That would be the painter term - tooth. Costume designers would talk about the weave or strands per square inch.

The tooth made it not unlike painting upon a rough watercolor paper. There is more "white" that is not covered and which adds a "light" to the painting. And the courseness stiffles details. The non-absorbency of the gesso surface made paint want to bead off the surface. That was a bit bothersome and time consuming. But the plus part of this more paint resistant surface is color could be lifted off back to the pure white of the canvas.

I particularly liked this in the skies. The clouds could have very white parts. And with a brush of clean water or a cue tip paint could be lifted off and the clouds sculpted.

So will I paint again on gesso canvas? Yes, I think I will. I think it will lend itself to vast canyon landscapes with huge skies.

Creative Void Or Avoidance

I started doing some painting today. Doing the skies on three new church paintings. All of them are experiments of sorts. Two being on a Gesso canvas instead of absorbent ground as I usually use. And one was a Gesso canvas that I applied thick and textured layers of absorbent ground too.


Churches are a good subject for me to experiment with as there is not that much experimentation in the subject matter as with my canyon pieces. I am not entirely sure how these three paintings will turn out but I had to jump start my creative juices somehow even if I dressed it up as a lab experiment.

So there I was getting into the different way the liquid watercolors were behaving on these varied surfaces and along comes the real world with an urgent legal issue that must be addressed. But surprisingly I went back to painting after making some calls and faxing some documents. So where I had a void of creativity I now was using creativity to avoid.

The above picture of a non-Catholic church in a little rural town was in my file of "churches to paint". I took it for the spire detail. Just one of those bits and pieces lying around the studio waiting to be picked up and worked into something creative.