Two Nocturnes; Two surfaces

Blaine Nocturne 1. Oil on Linen Panel. 6" x 8". $110.
Blaine Nocturne 2. Oil on #359 Linen Panel. 6" x 8". $110.

Great art show at Loomis Hall in Blaine on Friday night! The building was completely cool - really the nicest building in Whatcom County these days - and the view from the roof breathtaking.

Nocturnes were the province of Whistler. He did them first and it's not possible to take up a nocturne painting without thinking about him out on the Thames in a rowboat. He was an oil painter and preferred an absorbent surface for painting so that the paint soaked in - no brush strokes visible - and only the weave of the cloth showed, 'like breath on glass.'

Yesterday I worked on a nocturne of the view from the roof of Loomis Hall and it turned into two paintings. Note: the following will be keenly interesting only to oil painters.

So, here's the deal: I've been using these great panels from Windriverarts in Texas. Nice people, lovely linen panels. I started out on a small panel, oil primed w/ linen C13 but it wasn't working out. The surface was rough but non-absorbent and so the paint wasn't covering very well. Every brush stroke was visible, the darks were too thin. So I picked up a different panel, alkyd primed, w/ linen 359 and the darks soaked right in. Lovely. Thing is, so did the lights. It soaked up my lights. A nocturne without points of light is a little dull and the Blaine harbor below Loomis Hall was full of light.

Today both paintings were dry and I took them up again. The non-absorbent one that looked terrible at the start, took the second coat in a beautiful build-up and the lights stayed right on top of the darks. I mixed the lights with the most opaque titanium/cad mix possible to help with that. The alkyd primed absorbent one, 359, soaked up the darks again, for a lovely matte look, and still soaked up some of the light, but the cad is managing to sit on the surface a bit.

In the end, just two coats, I'm very happy with both surfaces.


Comments

Ann Chaikin said…
I really like your night paintings. And your choice to call them "Nocturnes" since I'm a musician as well as a painter. Beautiful paintings.
March 16, 2010 at 4:34 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My favorite love poem - West Wind 2 by Mary Oliver

Image
for Dan on Valentine's Day West Wind 2 by Mary Oliver You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and your heart's little intelligence, and listen to  me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a  dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks --- when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming---then row, row for your life toward it. Still Waters. ©2010. Lisa McShane.
Read more

#artinthetimeofcorona

Image
Tenino: Flooded River; Dalles at Dusk , 2020, Oil on Linen, 24" x 60". Shown here with Andrew Vallee sculptures. Hey check out this great blog article from Metropolitan Frame! It's an interview of me and where things are at with my work, given the virus. Metropolitan Frame is a custom frame shop in Minneapolis, Minnesota that produces most of the frames I use these days, including the one above. Their work is flawless and fits my work well. Click here for the article, #artinthetimeofcorona
Read more

My favorite art inventory system

Image
Over the past couple of years I've looked at and played with a lot of computer programs for keeping track of artwork. Here are past blog posts on the subject: Art Inventory Systems, here's what I've tried and then this Update on Art Inventory Systems Alyson Stanfield has also written about this riveting subject on her great blog here . I come to these systems with built-in bias. I prefer a FileMaker based system to an Access based system because I think it's a more powerful and smoother software to use. I'd worked for a nonprofit that used Filemaker and it's what I know. I also prefer a system without goofy graphics. I'm an artist. I care how things look. If I open up software every couple of days I would like it to be clean and simple and not ugly. But computers evolve and the next direction is to the cloud. That is a system where software doesn't live on your computer but you access it via the internet. I operate on 3 devices: my iMac in my
Read more