The current state of web design is driving me crazy. There are too many browsers with varying ways of interpreting style sheets and markups. There are browsers like IE 6 that require hacks and fixes to display a web page like other browsers. When I first put up my site I found that the Chrome browser had trouble with two of my pages and I had to scramble to rewrite them. I thought I had done pretty well and then noticed I was getting a number of Opera browsers to my site. I installed Opera and used it to look at my web pages. Wouldn’t you know I found that on the paintings page when you click on a painting the borders on the thumbnails bleed through the image.
I don’t have the time to even begin to wrestle with that one. Though new to Opera, I did find that if you are on the paintings page and hit the space bar on the keyboard the focus will drop to the bottom of the page. Hit the spacebar again and you will open the first painting. You can cycle through the paintings using the space bar. I will fix the border thing for Opera users when I redesign my site again. Addressing phones, tablets and the occasional X-Box is something else entirely.
I had a painting included in the Contemporary Florida 2011 exhibit at the Naples Museum of Art this past April. They sent me copies of newspaper articles about the exhibit and I was surprised to find my painting mentioned. They said it looked like something Vermeer might have painted if he lived in Crystal River. That was a very nice comment and I love Vermeer, but Holbein the Younger probably influenced my work more. My life changed one day standing in the Frick Museum staring at the painting of Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger. It gave me chills. I had been trying to make a change from watercolor to oil painting with out any success. It seemed totally beyond me and very frustrating. There in front of me was the work of a master. Hans could paint, the guy was in complete control of his media and I wondered how the heck he did it.
I happened to pick up a book while I was in New York, Max Doerner's The Materials of the Artists, that gave me the insight I needed. I found that at the time Holbein was painting it was common to under paint in egg tempera and then glaze it with oil paint that had been thinned with media enough to let the under painting show through. That was the handle I needed and I've been experimenting with under painting for over twenty years. The concept is fairly simple; use a water based media for the under painting which is precise and flows readily from the brush for the detail and oil paint glazes for the over painting for broad color, and subtlety. All painters probably want the same things from their paint. We want a dense opaque white with good coverage. A rich black that can be used for subtle tonal range. Color that is both opaque for blocking in and transparent to be used in glazes. The color should also be rich and have depth. The paint itself should be precise for detail and broad for large fields of color. Lastly it should be easy off the brush and effortless to work with. Unfortunately there isn't a painting medium that even comes close to this. Egg tempera is a very precise paint. It has a good opaque white and an adequate black. It also has a nice color quality. What it doesn't do is broad fields of color. You cannot blend brush strokes together and any transparent glazes are iffy to say the least. Oil paint however works very well in transparent glazes and naturally wants to work in broad fields of blended color. It doesn't like detail. Put the two together you get a painting like Holbein's Thomas More.
Over the years I've used many different materials for under painting. Why? Can I paint more quickly? No not really. Every painting always takes the time I have to paint it. Does the painting look different in some way? No not really. Whether I under paint or not my paintings all look like my paintings no matter how I've chosen to get there. So why? The answer is curiosity I guess and the pursuit of the ultimate painting medium. My last underpainting was with watercolor. I hadn't worked with watercolor for a very long time. I was amazed at how effortless it came off the brush and with precision. How much better would it be if I used ink for the blacks and egg tempera for the whites and then finish it off with rich oil glazes for color. It could be nice I'd like to try it.
