I woke late, rising at 10:30, but aware that the clocks going forward this Sunday made this actually 09:30. I hate the resetting of the clocks. It takes me weeks of jet-lag to adjust because I eat, sleep and work so much by the clock rather than feeling.
I started to glaze my Self Portrait As Tripod. Here is the underpainting on panel. This is painted with opaque earth colours: mars black, titanium/zinc white, naples yellow (actually titanium antimony chromium oxide, PBr24, which is like yellow ochre but always better), chromium oxide for the grass, earth reds for the flesh:
It's on a very smooth panel. It's rather simple and achromatic. I perhaps could have worked more on the colouration... but the idea is conceptual rather than a 'real' image, so I mentally divided the image into a wintery sky over a bleak field, and the flesh, and painted each part in its colours.
I started late today, much later that I would normally. The sky was glazed in raw umber and ultramarine greys, with some yellow too. For the distant hills I thought turquoise, to complement the flesh but this looked a little too odd, so later cut them down with the atmospheric yellows, and added more colour and warmth to the sky. The grasses, sage greens in the underpainting, needed lots of yellows (barely any green) and still they looked very green. The flesh used transparent violety reds made from ochres and manganese and transparent yellow ochre; all very permanent and not 'organic' pigments. The only real organic pigment I tend to use is benzimidazolone - both yellow and maroon, both lovely. Most brighter reds look awful.
At noon I prepared to watch the finale of Cheers. Seven or eight months ago, I had never seen an episode of Cheers. Channel 4 have them on continual loop so when Season 1, Episode 1, appeared, Deb suggested that we both (in our distant places) watch them all, and for the past seven or eight months, I've watched all 11 series, 20 or show shows per series, until today, until the grand 3-part finale, the finale I have been waiting for and counting down to for at least two months. And... as you might expect from such drama...
The clocks went forward so the recorder didn't record the episodes! Instead I recorded an hour of Countdown - a show I despise because it always gets recorded when the stupid set-top-box records the wrong thing. I felt unusually gutted and upset by this.
I continued to paint in the afternoon, and managed to finish the tiny panel by 18:15.
The painting is drying, so images of the final work must wait.
