A slow day. I've been feeling ill and tired for all of it because of my faulty digestive system and it's now the third day when I've felt constant tiredness due to lack of sleep and constant dull pain. It's been said that the most important thing you need as a painter is a good night's sleep and I concur, but also add that a good diet is more important because diet affects sleep and your whole body too.
All I've done today is apply the gold leaf to Perfection and Necrophilia. I've only gilded two other paintings so am still learning, however I now think that gold should be applied as near the start as possible and I have applied this over the imprimatura before underpainting. I needed to apply it twice because to gold wrinkled and made a mess at first, due to rushing, which was in turn due to use of some bad oil size which dried in mere minutes. With luck the gold will be that special spark of imperfection that makes the other parts of the picture perfect. In retrospect, the gilding itself sums up "perfection and necrophilia". It's flaking imperfect deadness but it's pure 24kt gold perfection too. I hope that when I tidy it up tomorrow the results will be good enough. Working with gold is really quite a beautiful thing to do but I've wasted an awful lot of good leaf today.
