A long and tiring day working on the Lachesis painting, I started at 08:15 and finished 18:30, but the underpainting is complete. It felt like walking a tightrope at times, I felt rushed and that there wasn't enough preparation, but I managed to work on the fly. The critical part was perhaps the water texture. Here is a segment from the finished underpainting:
The compositon isn't what you might call 'realistic' in setting, but all settings have varying elements of realism... only reality is really real; art is always about abstraction and encancement, even photography or film. Now, this night-ocean is actually liquid space being pulled up by the goddess Lachesis. I had drawn folds and some lines but thought I would paint some colours on the fly, generally copying the sky colours of darkness. I should have thought more clearly. What I was painting was water, it really needed to look watery.
I remember when I first painted clouds, wet in wet, on an old painting called Reaching For An Untouchable Strawberry, still one of my treasured favourites. I moved the brush almost at random and clouds appeared, almost like I'd set the brush to 'clouds' and it did the job. This has been a template ever since for how to paint textures. I know clouds intimately now, they are spheres on spheres, and so I can draw them with ease, and the same with rocks. Now I'm starting to do this with many things, even faces, hands, arms, and lots of natural textures as I work out the formula, the pattern and essence of an object.
To an extent, this is simply drawing in paint, so a fast form of copying, but there is an element of moving the texture to fit, and feeling. To paint clouds, I become a cloud, feel its essence, and then paint a self-portrait. This is the ultimate and key process. Today I did this for the water, and to help I looked at lots of watery shapes, splashes and drips, explosions of water, and even photographed droplets in the skin. The next step is to feel that, become the sea. The results are are from perfect, a study would have helped, but there is enough there to start with. There is an element of pareidolia, where you can see the shape you want in the 'random' strokes as you paint - so you need good visual knowledge of the form, which takes years to accumulate. All of this is essentially how to paint from imagination.
This painting is very strong in colours, and perhaps I needed a full colour study first. I've painted many but, as it turns out, 95% of them are exactly how I would want to paint it, so sometimes there is an element of spoiler to even doing one. I think, generally, the colours here are acceptable, and I can tweak them in glazing. I can't turn blue into red (unless I glaze opaquely, I would not do that!) but intensity and gentle shifts are not only easy but part of the process, you don't really want the same hue in glaze and underpainting; it is the very difference between the two that creates the beauty because glazes both act like filters (and so mix subtractively) and reflectors (so the top layer has a dominant glow).
It's now past 10pm and all I've done is paint and record my activities for the day. I'm exhausted. I am reminded that art is about giving everything.
