Finished the under-drawing yesterday, but had more to think about. Unity of the idea is important, but on a large scale it's hard to maintain. It's a similar problem with unity in a large piece of music; how I find it easier to unify a 4-track EP than a 12-track album. A few large scale artworks can have this problem... particularly fantastical or surrealistic ones as these can be too large, too complex or full to conceive in an instant. Here's a sketch part way though, the hand roughly outlined, refined in position later.
My ultimate theme is a (futile) quest for perfection, the same idea as Dürer's Melencolia I, and to help the hapless observer along, there are lots of Melencolia bits. Today, I made a few tiny changes to the drawing I had the idea of adding a ladder, and I made a lighting model for this:
Then a model for the whole scene:
The figure on the left is from Supper at Emmaus, but will be lit from the right, not left. Then, tracing and canvas preparation.
I'm working faster than normal and feel exhausted. Today, I had a bite of world-famous Market Drayton gingerbread and that revived me in an instant. This gave me an unpleasant echo of Beethoven in his last days; a sip of wine magically revived him, but it was a transient lift in his terminal decline. I hope my decline is transient! It's been a frantic 2023 so far, which is how I like things.
