Moving right along - size gilding and transfer leaf

Yes, it's been almost a year.

Deal.

I thought I'd get back to writing about the process of learning iconography, Byzantine, Gothic and early Renaissance painting techniques. What the heck. If the world's ending, what do you want to be caught doing? Tweeting? Seriously?

Instead of an interminable post about what I've been doing for the last year, I'm going to assume that most of the readers who come back will have been keeping up on Facebook and elsewhere anyway, so I'll just dive right in where we are now.

Which is here:

It's late July, 4:45 pm GMT+1. The temperature outside is about 38C, and the windows and shutters are closed up to keep at least some of the Italian summer blaze outside. And I've just had some fun unboxing the latest order from Dal Molin.

It's always fun when you get a box of iconography goodies from Dal Molin, the Italian iconography supplier Up Norff. They never did stop working and delivering all through our Covid Crisis. The other day they sent their regular online customers an email saying, as a small family business, they were taking a couple of weeks off, most of August in fact. (This is normal in Italy).

Because I've got three more commissions, and I hope to get going on things immediately, I took the opportunity to order some stuff. Two more books of 23k leaf, a roll of imitation, some Red Oxide pigment and a bottle of oil-based gilder's size. All part of an exciting new adventure in what I think I'm going to call Less Painful Gilding.



I've learned two things in this process: 1) I hate gilding with the white hot passion of a thousand-thousand burning suns, and 2) everybody wants gilding. Gilding is glam. Gilding is Noble. It's Real. It's beautiful and lasting and deeply symbolically meaningful.



First sheet for a project in the spring. 23 3/4 carat. Somewhere between 1/8000 mm to 1/10,000 mm thick. It's so thin you can't touch it with your fingers or it will stick to the microscopic irregularities on your skin. You have to close the windows and turn off any fans. You can't breathe when you lift it (with a special brush made of very fine natural animal hairs) or your breath will twist it over on itself. Then it sticks to itself. Then you have to try to tease it apart using only brushes and get it to lie down flat again. You can't move your hands or arm too quickly close to it because the air movement will pick it up. It's incredibly fiddly to deal with and really a massive pain. But nothing else does what it does.

And doing it has, so far, made me feel like a giant balled fist with clenched teeth. I hate gilding. It makes me want to stab myself in the brain with a chopstick. I was desperate to find some other way of doing it.



So, this is going to seem a bit arcane, but with the new red pigment, Italian Red Oxide, a way opens. In the packet (they send it to you in little plastic zip lock bags) it looked almost identical to the Pozzuoli Rosso I already had. But I mixed them with a bit of water and did a test, and look at the difference. (This pic was taken in bad light with the shutters closed against the afternoon inferno. It's much redder in decent light.)

But the big difference is the grind. It's incredibly fine, as you would expect with a synthetic rather than a ground earth pigment. The Pozz. Ross. gets its colour from exactly the same substance - iron oxide - but because it's an ochre it's a kind of tinted clay, so is very grainy and much less intense - technical term: "saturated" - than the pure iron oxide pigment.

More importantly, the two textures are totally different. And this is because I'm going to use it for gilding. The Pozz. Ross. would have been really unsuitable for what I wanted to do with it, which is to create a coloured ground for gilding. You have to have something coloured underneath the leaf because the gold is so thin the colour of whatever's underneath will show through. So if you put it on a white background it will be dull. Red is best. I've also used yellow ochre, which doesn't give quite the same drama.

But to a two-molecule-thick piece of gold leaf, the graininess of the earth pigment would have been like lying over sandpaper. The little bumps of the ochre grains create little minute shadows which bring down the reflectivity of the whole thing.



Getting an extremely high shine is the point of going to all the extra work when you use bole, sanding, burnishing and polishing it incredibly smooth.

Applying the first layer of bole for an icon of St. Joseph in the spring.

Bole is just fine grain red clay and is the same colour as the red oxide pigment. It stays porous and absorbent, so the leaf will stick to it, while being capable of being polished to a very high shine. Then once you've got the gold down you can burnish it again, mashing the grains into each other with the gold on top and this, in theory, gives you the incredible Russian style mirror-shine.















 ... like this...


(Every time I've burnished gold it either rubs right off or bubbles up and creates holes. Please Lord, no more burnishing.)

 But LAWKS the amount of work you have to do to get there! and the agony of not being able to do it. The least little microscopic flaw in the bole will show through with the gold, and, short of sanding everything off and starting again, you can't fix it. It's incredibly nerve wracking.

This other method with gilding size and red oxide pigment is, reportedly, way simpler. Though you can't get that Russian mirror shine thing - which I could never do anyway.

 You paint the area to be gilded with Red Oxide pigment - no tempera medium, just mixed with distilled water or a little gum arabic watercolour medium. When it's dry, you apply the size, which is just a special chemical adhesive for gold leaf. You paint it on, and wait three hours. It'll be tacky to the touch, but not wet.


 

Then instead of using the loose leaf gold, you've finally wised up and bought the transfer gold, which you can cut with scissors and lift with the sort of low-friction silicone paper stuff it comes with. So you don't have to use the gilding tip (the long-hair squirrel brush that sometimes picks up a piece of leaf... and sometimes doesn't, as the mood strikes...) you just pick it up with your fingers, lay it down paper side up on the tacky size, rub the paper with your finger so it's good and stuck, peel back the paper and voy-lah! Gilding!

I'm also looking forward to doing more of this technique, which the Italians call "laghetto" - little lake or puddle - and the iconographers call a "float" because the pigment particles are suspended in a very thin solution of egg medium and water, and so float down slowly to settle on the surface of the panel, giving a very pleasing natural mottled effect, which you use as an underpainting.

 Like this:

 
But you can't use anything grainy, and the more finely ground the pigment the more even the finished result. So, the Red Oxide along with my Ultramarine is going to look very well, I think...

Practice

Yesterday's practice.

Subdividing Thursday's blocks of colour imprimatura and learning the trick of creating the secondary colour not by mixing on a palette but by glazing, meaning applying very thin translucent layers of colour over top.

Learning value by mixing four or five different values of a single colour, applied with tiny brush strokes over top of the base colour imprimatura (that I think the Byzantines call "proplasmos").







Tricky.



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More experiments

It's funny how the old methods turn out to be better than the new Bright Ideas.

Trying to be a bit more systematic, learning the rather tricky egg tempera glazing methods and colour mixing.


Italian ice cube trays are ridiculous for making ice. Teeny little cubes that melt before you can start drinking your drink. But for colour mixing in egg tempera...

This is the other icon painter/egg tempera channel I'm using.

All in French but it's not that hard to understand. (And maybe my French might get a little better...)



Here's my first stage. I'm going to wait until it's bone dry, then do the glazing. The idea is that egg tempera paint is translucent, so the first layer of colour shows through and you put a thin glaze over it to make a third colour. Yellow over a blue base makes green, etc.

The top row is all from the same colours: Yellow ochre, Alizerin crimson and Burnt umber with a dab of ivory black. It shows how much difference can be created just making very small changes in the mix.



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Having a go

A couple of months ago I signed up for the Patreon page of Ikonographics, run by a woman, Julia Hayes, from South Africa - who lives in Athens - and has been studying Byzantine iconography for many years.

She has essentially the same idea I have about art; learn to do it the hardest way possible. Do all the traditional techniques, learn the practices and materials that created the great works. Once you've mastered the super-duper hard stuff - like learning to draw icons free-hand, no tracing or even copying, you can have the freedom to do work that just learning the cheap n' dirty, easy way can't give you.

This is obviously not the way to do a finished icon, on watercolour paper. It's just an exercise in things like getting the drawing proportions right, colour mixing, using the paint, getting used to the way egg tempera goes on with a brush, what kind of brushes work best - and what tools and materials I'm going to have to buy.



I spent an hour yesterday just doing pages and pages of ovals. I bought a box of cheap-o copier paper to practice drawing on, so I can just cover the pages in doodles and scribbles, and not feel bad about tossing them at the end of the day. It's amazing how hard it is to draw a simple oval shape - not pointy on top like an egg, or flat sides, or bumpy or lop-sided - just by eyeballing it. I've got several pages in my workbook of hands, eyes, noses...

Today I thought I'd have a go at using the paint.


Wobbly oval on a centre axis line. Hilariously difficult. (It's off-centre on purpose.)



Finished the drawing, but then you go over it with a gum eraser to pull the graphite off, or it shows through too much.



First few layers are yellow ochre, mixed with egg medium and thinned way down with distilled water. (Yes, it's supposed to be streaky.)


It's certainly not at all like any painting technique I'm used to. You do one colour at a time, and you just paint right the heck over top of your drawing. Then you mix up a little dark tone and go over the drawing - which shows through the translucent paint.



I've been using egg medium mixed with artists' quality gouache - Windsor and Newton among others - and have been very pleased with the way it changes the gouache as a medium. Gone are the frustrations with it drying darker or lighter, it flows and lays so much easier.

Drawbacks with practicing using watercolour paper is the drying time. Egg tempera paint dries in seconds, but the paper absorbs the water, so the pain won't set as well. This means if you do the next layer too soon, before the paper has had a chance to dry out sufficiently, the water in your next pass will reactivate the paint underneath, making it lift. So, you just have to wait a lot longer between passes. I got the hair dryer out, and tried it for a few seconds but then the thought, "There's no way this will not end badly." So, never mind impatience. Let it take the time it's going to take.

The neat thing about iconography, as you can see in this video that I'm using as a model...

...that you do it dark to light. You start with the darker values and slowly layer by layer build up to the highest highlights. So it's like the figure is emerging towards the viewer out of the darkness.

Another hilarious fun-fact about egg tempera paint: "How come Byzantine and medieval painters mixed their paint colours in little cups or sea shells and not on a palette, like oils?" Egg tempera is runny. You use it very thinned down.


This was three colours when I started. Live n' learn.

Of course, the traditional method is to use raw powdered pigment, to mull it yourself with egg medium and paint on a board treated with many layers of home-made gesso. I do have a bit of powdered pigment, but I think for me, learning something like this is best treated like algebra; add only one variable at a time. (Also, glass mullers are hella-spensive.) I also bought the makings for rabbit-skin "True Gesso" a while back, and hope to give it a go soon.

Learn one new thing each time. I'm a long way to mastering the drawing (don't look at the hands!) and just starting to get used to colour mixing. One thing at a time, I figure.



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Medieval whales

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Egg tempera is the painting medium of the saints; oil is for profane moderns

Well, a whole week away in Rome and Santa Marinella! The glorious liturgy of the Church for Triduum, including the pre-1955 Good Friday (four hours that flew past!), Easter feasting and evenings with friends. It's more excitement than I'm used to, that's for sure.


Bertie is certainly glad I've brought the Lap home with me.

Getting started on a New Thing

But one big practical reason to go to the City from time to time is the presence of the art supply store that sells ALL THE THINGS!

Poggi on the Viale Trastevere, I learned, has all the things needed to do classical, original-materials egg tempera painting. Right down to the fancy-schmancy agate burnishers and stamping tools, Armenian bole and all manner of arcane sizing and finishing potions for gilding and to decorate the gold. I'm not quite at that stage yet, being determined not to bite off more than I can chew with this learning curve. Strictly going one step at a time.

But I did take one pretty significant step forward.



No more commercial acrylic gesso for me!

Pictured, left to right, are about 400 g of rabbit skin glue granules, 1 kg of "polvere di marmo" - Carrara marble dust - that has a completely different texture from the regular Bologna gypsum - and a jar of ready-made True Gesso (that I'm not too sure about). The marble dust has the highest recommendations from the experts who are doing all the research re-constructing this medium. The difference is quite pronounced; marble has a texture like extremely fine sand or even fine-granule sugar or salt, while the gypsum is more like the chalk dust that used to collect at the base of the classroom blackboard.

Egg tempera painters call the rabbit-skin-glue-marble-dust/gypsum kind, "True Gesso" (always capitalised) to distinguish it from commercial acrylic gesso. The difference is rather like the difference between egg tempera painting and oil painting in general. Acrylic gesso is Novusordo gesso, a profane, modernist outgrowth of Protestant gesso.




It's a bit of palaver to make and apply, but I think that really just adds the value of authenticity to the work. And there's nothing more fun than learning something ancient and arcane.

Lost arts are the best arts.

How the Protestant/Secular revolution really happened...

Koo Schadler, the recognised queen of traditional egg tempera research and technique - whose book a kind benefactor bought for me recently - says something quite profound about the transition in the art of Christendom in the early 1400s...



In one of her articles on her website, "History of Egg Tempera Painting" she notes that the transition from egg tempera to oils was one of the things that changed our civilisation from a Christian to a profane or "secular" one.

"Greater realism suited the less spiritually oriented, more scientific and humanistic culture of the Renaissance."

It wasn't merely the usual story we all know - that society was changing from other factors, that humanism was being born in Europe through the influence of ancient texts newly re-discovered at the Spanish Reconquista. It was the influence of northern European painters, using oils, producing artworks of a completely different - profane - nature brought down to Italy.

"Northern European painters were not as immersed in an egg tempera tradition, and their guilds were not as beholden to a particular school or working method. Northern Europe also had a history of an early form of oil painting behind it [Byzantine/Christian Greek]. Thus it was in the north that more experimental materials and methods began to develop. In his book on the lives of famous painters, the 16th c. historian Giorgio Vasari credits Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck with single-handedly creating the revolutionary technique of oil painting. In actuality the use of drying oils in easel painting can be traced back to a long and gradual development.  

"Oils were used in decorative painting and as protective coatings throughout the middle ages, probably earlier. These early oils were generally dark, thick, and not well suited to easel painting. But by the 1400s texts began to appear that described how to refine drying oils to make them lighter in tone, faster drying and have better working properties. 

"A commercial renaissance was taking place throughout Europe and with it came the distribution of the new materials, methods, and the paintings that resulted. 

By the late 1300s to early 1400s, northern European painters were working partly or entirely in oil.1 Slow drying oil paints blend more readily than fast drying, linear tempera. This makes it easier in oil to paint smooth transitions and three-dimensional forms. Because of its higher refractive index, oil is capable of darker shadows than can be achieved in tempera. Whereas tempera must be applied in thin layers, oil can be applied thickly (impasto), which contributes opacity to lights and highlights and makes them “pop”.  

"In other words, oil is better suited to creating natural light effects, atmosphere and more realistic imagery in general. Greater realism suited the less spiritually oriented, more scientific and humanistic culture of the Renaissance." 

...

- Panel paintings prior to 1400 are most likely pure egg tempera.  

- Panel paintings from 1400 to 1500 can be either pure egg tempera, or a combination of tempera and oil, or pure oil. The later in the 1400s the work was painted, the more likely it is oil (although not necessarily). More linear brushwork indicates egg tempera; more smoothly blended, atmospheric work indicates tempera grassa or oil.  

 - By the early 1500s nearly all panel paintings were executed in oil (with the exception of icons). 

I blame William of Occam for this too.

It really does explain a lot, particularly about why the northern Renaissance art of more or less the same period as the Italian art has such a markedly different tone or "feel". The subject matter is still broadly the same, since it is mostly the still-intact European Catholic Church doing the commissioning. But the northern painting of Jan van Eyck (c. 1390 – 9 July 1441) is already of a completely different nature - and obviously a completely different purpose - from that of Fra Angelico whose dates, 1395 – 1455, are about the same. And it's pretty significant, I think, that Fra Angelico has been beatified by the Church where his contemporaries, often much more famous and lauded to us moderns as "innovators," and later Italian painters like Leonardo and Raphael, are not.

It all rather hearkens back to what I was saying before about why modern "sacred art" - even when done by consciously devout modern Catholics for authentically Catholic reasons - fails in ways that we modern people have a hard time understanding clearly.

"This is why these modern "sacred art" paintings that try to "humanise" sacred persons using modern visual standards fail as sacred art. This is a function of Modernism, both in its artistic and theological expressions; the urge to de-sacralise the subject by naturalising it. But naturalistic visual language has become so ubiquitous - the photograph is now the only visual standard - that modern viewers of sacred art, while they may be aware that these works fail to do what they're advertised to do, fail to do what the art of Fra Angelico did, they often do not understand why."

...

The point with sacred art is not to depict the subject - the Virgin Mary or an angel, for instance - as looking like a particular person, but to depict a completely different order of reality, one that "eye has not seen..." and which cannot ever be fully grasped by the human mind in this life.

These details of paintings by the great transitional (late Gothic/early Renaissnce) sacred painter, Duccio Buoninsegna, (c.1255/1260 – c. 1318/1319) clearly show the development of Italian sacred art from its Byzantine roots. All the "canons" of proportion and form are present.

It is hard not to recall reading this article by Koo Schadler that the Protestant Revolution, that protocatastrophe that led us into all this modern misery, didn't start in notoriously secular and materially wealthy Florence.

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It is good to be home

And there's lots to do. Going away for a week at the very moment the spring is making everything spring leaves you with lots and lots of work.

Beds to finish filling, things to turn over, cantaloupe, hollyhock, nasturtium and squash seedlings to plant out...

Home is best.

Now the question is, "Do I let him stay on the worktable while I'm gessoing and painting?"



On the one hand, Bertie has only just established this as his Spot. Poor chap has been a bit displaced while the other two are more assertive. But cat hair in the paint...


UPDATE:


I should have known. Poor old Bertram just can't catch a break.


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Egg tempera and the Renaissance

Fascinating talk on egg tempera painting in the early Italian Renaissance. He's got a few modern prejudices - especially about Byzantine art - but a good overview of how the world of western art developed from the canons of the ancient Christian East.

It would be great if artists who know about the history of art would trouble themselves to learn something about the history of the Church, since the two are so intimately bound up.

("Pappacy"? ... really? I know it's kind of mean, but I can't stop smiling every time he tries to pronounce "Giotto". "Jeeyahddo."...)



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Medieval painting; how it's done

Conservators and other art-expert people know now that certain pigments are more chemically stable than others. The green, apparently, lasts more or less forever, but the pink and white dabbed over top to make skin tone doesn't. This means that when the painting gets to five or seven or eight hundred years old, you can really see how it was constructed.


Someone asked me what I'm looking for when I go up to the National Gallery with my magnifying lens to look at the medieval and early Renaissance altarpieces, expecting me to start waxing poetically about the spirituality of sacred art. I said, "Brushstrokes." She seemed a bit disappointed.

This little screen cap from the video shows a bit of what you see when you look very closely at these paintings. The lovely "sfumato" effect, the delicate and subtle changes in colour, the contours of the face, the infinitely delicate golden hairs, the transparent veiling... are all achieved not as in oils with big swathes of paint, but with many many layers and tiny little dibby-dabs of brush strokes over an underpainting. 

But the trouble with art books is that the resolution is un-alterable. You can't zoom in close enough with a picture in a book. This is the one advantage we have with the internet. A lot of museums now are producing super-hi-res photos of the paintings so art students and historians can zoom in to micro-close views to see how the paintings are constructed. But of course, if you live in Italy you can just take the bus up to Perugia and pay the super-low 8 bucks to go look at the real thing. Once you get over the shock and awe of actually being in the same room with these things, you can sort out quite a lot just from looking.


One of the things I like about all this is learning these ancient and somewhat arcane ways of combining natural materials to produce your own art supplies. The long process he's doing here in the first half is to make 'bole" the red clay gesso that goes under gilding.


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Art supply news and adventures in Egg Tempera

Nitram, for those outside the world of traditional academic drawing circles, is the most important artists' charcoal producer in the world. Their product is used in all the ateliers and studios of the "Classical Realist" revival around the world.

Based in Quebec. The last time I heard their entire operation was closed because of a fire. One of their charcoal kilns ignited the whole thing. But I guess they're back.




I think I could figure out how to do a version of this at home. Maybe use a glass muller like this...



...and grind up a bunch of leftover charcoal, mix with some gum arabic as a binder... Charcoal watercolour... It's a thought. I've also got a bunch of pure sanguine that does grind down to a very nice fine powder, but tends to be too crumbly to use in chunks. I've made a bit of "sangine ink" just by mixing some water with the powder, and it's pretty fun to use.


Egg Tempera experiments

I recently started adding egg tempera medium to artist's quality gouache and have found it's really great. It solves all manner of problems with gouache - like that incredibly irritating thing with it drying lighter than when you put it on - and makes the paint much smoother and easier to work with and resolves that ultra-flat matte finish that I didn't like about gouache.

The finished results of my egg-gouache experiment in December, a commission from California for four miniatures for the Christmas tree:




Here they are in the clearer photos I took myself, showing the process a bit:



Source material: just a page cut out of a book on Fra Angelico's painting.



And a screen shot from a 14th century manuscript page from the British Library.  Not specifically about Christmas, but I thought the happy, sleepy animals looked sort of Christmassy nonetheless.




Traced the drawing, then go over it on the back with a soft graphite pencil, about a 3B, then flip the paper over and transfer the graphite to the surface with a stylus (I used a porcupine quill). The little wooden forms were 3 inches diameter (bought in a packet of 50 from Amazon) and finished by a thin layer of plaster, sanded and then covered in commercial (acrylic-based) gesso.


For this one, I copied the drawing from the original into my sketch book, then simplified it and traced it.


Background started with Arabic Gold gouache paint (Finetec) and some gilding gesso for the raised parts. Going to have to work a lot harder on the raised gesso technique. I spent a lot of time in the Perugia National Gallery looking at the original Fra Angelicos with my magnifying lens and a huge part of the impact of his work, what makes it look otherworldly, is the incredibly intricate gesso work. Patterns impressed with specialised tools into the gesso under the gilding is what creates the amazing light quality. It's hard to describe, and I'm sure the tools no longer exist. More research required. But I wasn't at all happy with the effect of the gilding gesso, which came out lumpy no matter how much I scraped and sanded it.



Did a layer of Primary Yellow under the gold, hoping it would brighten up a bit. The green for the underpainting of skin tones was the standard technique in egg tempera painting (before oils were developed and popularized later in the Renaissance) and comes from the Byzantine icon style that was the standard for sacred painting in Italy before the Giotto revolution. If you look very, very closely at the originals you will see that the shadows on the skin tone of the medieval altarpieces and Madonnas all have a very slightly green undertone.


Correcting the drawing (perspective) as I paint... not exactly recommended...



Getting there...


The scale was really difficult and I don't think I'm destined by God or nature to be a miniaturist. The stress was monstrous. One slip, one minute jiggle and it's ruined. The faces are put on a dot at a time with the magnifier in one hand. I must invest in one of those goose neck magnifier lamps. Or a headset. Or just never ever do another miniature again as long as I live...



Finished.

Same general process for the Happy Animals, but quite a bit more forgiving...



Unfortunately, my crummy camera work doesn't pick up the colours very well, and the little points of stars in the background (Finetec "Moon Gold") lose their shine entirely in the pic, but this gives the general gist.

So, improvement, I think. And starting to get the knack of the egg tempera medium. Or at least, getting the beginning of a feel for it. As you will see, to be an expert egg tempera painter in the traditional manner is no small weekend project...

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Learning the technique



The egg tempera technique is incredibly complex when it's done in its full traditional manner, but its very arcane, ancient and alchemical aspects of it is what lends it such a mystique. But as a "lost" art, outside the rather rarified circles of Byzantine iconographers, it does have the disadvantage of being quite difficult to learn. There's a lot you just have to more or less figure out on your own. Fortunately, I live in Italy...


Its use was universal in the early Renaissance and all the great masters of the period used it exclusively. Oils didn't come into use until they were developed from egg tempera, with "tempera grasso" ("oily" or "fatty" tempera). There is ONE book by a contemporary egg tempera artist who has done the research to fully re-create the techniques, and a very small number of professionals using the ancient methods in modern ways. I've only just begun to scratch the surface.

Part of the challenge is getting hold of the materials. Properly done, in the medieval and early Renaissance style, egg tempera paint is made by mulling a tiny quantity at a time, direct from raw powdered pigment, each batch made for use in just one day's work. So mixing paint - a long process by itself requiring special skills and tools - was done daily by the artist or his apprentice. Traditionally, each day's paints were only one colour, and you put them onto your painting in a sort of patchwork method. A painting was made by an incredibly painstaking process of multiple layers of very thin transluscent paint. Each layer had to be allowed to dry and set completely before the next layer could be applied. The advantage of egg tempera is that it dries very quickly compared to oils, so several layers could be applied in one day.

Another big difference from oils is that you don't use it on a stretched canvas but on a solid surface, usually wood panels made of poplar wood and laminated together in pieces in order to allow for the expansion and contraction of the wood with changes in humidity and temperature.

These wood panels are sanded and then finished with a type of gesso called "True Gesso" that is itself normally home made. I'm pretty sure you can't buy True Gesso anywhere ready made.


You can buy (very tiny and expensive quantities of) rabbit skin glue flakes at Spoleto's art supply shop. I know you can get it in bulk at Poggi, the professional art supplier in Rome, and I think you can order it online in larger quantities from specialist places like Zecchi. I bought a nice kilo of Gesso di Bologna, which is a kind of industry standard, but 've been told the best True Gesso is not made with gypsum but marble dust. I'm on an egg tempera painter's page on Facebook and they exchange information on super-sekrit ways of getting hold of marble dust and what kind of marble is best. (Carrara marble, apparently, is great for sculpting, but makes gesso that doesn't hold the paint very well...)



THEN you have to get the right kind of linen cloth - unbleached, coarse weave - and glue it to your poplar boards, and the True Gesso goes on that in layers once it's dried. Each gesso layer must be allowed to dry completely and then sanded smooth. There are also special methods of sanding to get the desired finish... Apparently the last sanding can best be done with a cuttle fish bone, which I happen to have in abundance (picked up off the beach in winter cuttle fish fishing season and taken home with the thought, "Maybe these will be useful for something some day.").

Fortunately, instead of allowing myself to get intimidated by all this amazing (ahem) Byzantine complexity, I just figured I'd give it a go with the materials I've got. This has allowed me to do it sort of algebraically, by adding a single variable to the equation at a time. Started with gouache, then learned how to make an egg emulsion medium and mix it, and the results are leaps ahead of where I was. Now I've gone down to the art supplier in Spoleto and bought two little jars of powdered pigment, some rabbit skin glue flakes and a kilo of Gesso di Bologna and some ready-made panels. 

So I think I might be ready to level up. I figure as long as I'm not trying to do The Whole Thing Exactly Right Every Time, I can allow myself to experiment, and the possible mistakes don't turn the whole thing into a Big Giant Disaster in my brain. It's all a matter of tricking your brain into not freaking out.



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Why is contemporary sacred art not very sacred? Ideal proportions and the perfections of heaven

So, I guess it shouldn't be surprising that the icon painters use the standard "canon" of idealised portraiture. I learned this in my study of Renaissance and Gothic Italian painting. The idea that there are mathematically precise measurements of the "ideal" human form is one of the key lessons of the great Renaissance masters. But of course they didn't invent it. Art historians will tell you that the ideals of Italian Renaissance painting didn't come from some lost Greek text rediscovered and sold to a Montefeltro or Medici noble, but developed slowly from Byzantine art, and through the Gothic adaptations. And the math of the human figure was one of those things that were considered great secrets of the trade.

How closely your face coincides with these mathematically ideal proportions is what makes us think it is beautiful or not. Of course, the beauty of a human face or form is about more than proportions (and involves a lot of historical, cultural and environmental factors) but it starts with math.


You don't have to have "perfect" proportions to be beautiful. Here's a photoshopping of Audrey Hepburn that makes her face fit more closely these classical "ideal" proportions, and it completely dulls her brilliance, makes her celebrated face totally uninteresting.

And it kind of depicts what I'm talking about. This idealised beauty, this kind of mathematical proportional perfection, is not intended to depict anything in this world; it's not supposed to look like a particular person. Applying it to a real person just dehumanises. This is why people who undertake plastic surgery either to try to preserve their youth or (even more scary) to remodel themselves after some artificial, cultural standard of beauty, always end up looking bizarre and frightening. Neither Fra Angelico's angels nor Barbie dolls are supposed to look like human beings, and human beings trying to make themselves look like them are really just trying to flee from their own real selves.

But at the same time, this is why it makes perfect sense for the canon of Byzantine and Gothic and early Renaissance sacred art to follow these ideal proportions very closely, since the art form is heavily symbolic. These idealised, mathematical proportions for the human form was a technique developed by the Greeks and Egyptians (and probably Babylonians) to help them depict their gods in painting and sculpture. Math and sacred art have always gone together, and have always been understood to depict some reality that isn't normally visible.

This is why these modern "sacred art" paintings that try to "humanise" sacred persons using modern visual standards fail as sacred art. This is a function of Modernism, both in its artistic and theological expressions; the urge to de-sacralise the subject by naturalising it. But naturalistic visual language has become so ubiquitous - the photograph is now the only visual standard - that modern viewers of sacred art, while they may be aware that these works fail to do what they're advertised to do, fail to do what the art of Fra Angelico did, they often do not understand why.




The point with sacred art is not to depict the subject - the Virgin Mary or an angel, for instance - as looking like a particular person, but to depict a completely different order of reality, one that "eye has not seen..." and which cannot ever be fully grasped by the human mind in this life.

The point of sacred art is to depict the idealised form of the person. Kind of like those videos of Korean girls making themselves look like Asian barbie dolls with face tape and nose putty... only less horrifying. In fact, those weird videos, and this strange thing of completely modifying your face or body to fit some odd cultural ideal of beauty that only exists in photoshopped magazine photos, or more appallingly in Manga cartoons, sort of illustrates what I'm talking about. These culturally-derived, arbitrary "ideals" - cf: foot-binding - have led to some pretty grotesque horrors. This is because there is a failure to understand the distinction between what the sacred artists depict as heavenly perfection -  meant to be "unattainable" in this life, as well as eternal - and ordinary, earthly human beauty that is necessarily fleeting.


The ideal perfection of the Sassoferrato Madonna is a good example. Every single thing about this painting is idealised; the face, the colours, the light, the pose the skin tone... everything. No one ever took a copy of this painting to a plastic surgeon and asked to be made to look like this. The purpose of this painting is not to show us what the Virgin "looked like" but what kind of person she is. It is intended to depict her spiritual perfections and glories.

It's understood that this is a heavenly reality, something to venerate, something to inspire to prayer and the pursuit of holiness and Christian perfection. It's intended, as all real sacred art is, to depict an entirely different kind of reality, one that people of Faith used to be able to recognise.

This is from the Ghent Altarpiece. It's a picture not of a mere human person, a pretty but rather overdressed young woman, reading a book in this world. It's a picture of life in heaven, eternal, unchanging, perfect and glorified. It is an attempt to depict a kind of reality that we will never see with our eyes in this life, at least, not until the Changing of the World.

Every single thing about it is symbolic. The flowers, the gold, the pearls, the book, the pose... everything. You don't just look at a painting like this, you read it. And to do that, you have to know the language.

But photography, that now guides all our tastes in pictorial art,  has caused us to forget the language of sacred art. Now we take a banal, earthly thing, a photograph of a pretty woman, and hold it up as some kind of ideal, and try to make ourselves look like it. Women who are older or fatter or less "even-featured" than the photograph don't feel uplifted by it; they feel intimidated and oppressed by the demand it makes.

The this-worldlinness of photography is what makes it completely inappropriate as a model for sacred art.


So, now instead of paintings like the ones above, modern "sacred artists" (I exclude here the ones who are merely mocking sacred art with postmodern "irony") are producing works founded on a totally earthly, this-worldly visual language.


And it ends up being trite, uninteresting and ultimately disappointing. You can't help but look at it and think, If this is what heaven is like, how are we supposed to spend our lives - and if necessary our deaths - trying to obtain it? How is it different from what we've got now?

How many jumps is it from this...


These aren't cherubs; they're just a couple of human kids.
That's not the Blessed Virgin; it's a studio model, a particular person, playing her.


...


...to this?

The weirdness of the first one as a work of devotional art intended for a church altar, the reason it just sits oddly, is that its visual language is not that of classical sacred, devotional art, but of film. We're used to movies in which sacred persons are being played by actors, so in a sense we're accustomed to being lied to about their identity. It's OK for a movie because that's how that art form works. But these paintings use the same framework, and it fails, because film and sacred painting have completely different purposes. Having models "play" these people for paintings pushes back the depiction of heavenly glory that sacred art is intended for, into the mental framework of a film, in which the viewer is supposed to suspend his disbelief. He's supposed to watch a movie and just put into a mental cupboard the fact that Jesus is being played by Robert Powell or Jim Caveizel.

But that's not what sacred painting is supposed to do. Looking at a work of Fra Angelico depicting a "sacred conversation" is supposed to be like getting a little glimpse of heaven, as though we are peeking through a magical window. It's what Byzantine icons are intended to be; a window through which the sweet and wild winds of heaven blow.

But modern people are more used to watching movies at home about the life of Jesus than they are used to looking at a Fra Angelico or Pinturicchio altarpiece in their local parishes. This is why there has been such a wide acceptance of this kind of modernistic, photographically-informed painting, especially among "conservative" North American church-goers. And I'll admit it's a step up from the horrors of postmodern abstract "sacred art". (I mean horrors, for real.)

But sacred art and photography can really have very little to do with each other; their purposes are completely different. Whereas photography is a merely scientific rendering of physical objects in space, sacred art is intended to depict perfected, heavenly reality, one that we can never fully appropriate in this life, and for which mathematics is the only adequate earthly analogy.

Until modern Catholic painters trying to produce new sacred art understand the difference, and start learning the old, lost language of mathematically idealised forms, they're going to keep producing stuff that just looks ... well... modern, a naturalistic and essentially this-worldly, material reality.



~

Keanu says, "Yes, do that."

I've always been a big Keanu fan. I liked him in Bill and Ted, (though I didn't really like the movies much). I liked Speed a LOT and Point Break has become a classic action cop movie. But I liked him as a person too. He seems... humble. Kind of down to earth. The stories of him giving away his salary to the technical workers on the sets of his movies are pretty impressive. He seems like a decent guy.(Hard to tell with Hollywood types, I know...but on just a gut-level...) Now he's started a company that makes custom motorcycles, which seems like a manly thing to do.

So, I'm willing to listen when, to the question, "Should I work on transitioning from writing to full time painting?" he says, "Yes, you really like painting."



A while back I emailed Daniel Mitsui, whose work I've been following for years. He's a man after my own heart, who loves sacred art, medieval manuscripts and botanical/biological art. His style is completely different from mine (and his "brand" is instantly recognisable and is appearing in more and more places around the innerwebz.) I asked him, "Is it possible to make a living doing this sort of "popularised" sacred art, full time?"

His quick answer was, "Yes, definitely."


His long answer, if you're interested in the details of how one does this, can be found on his website, here, here and here. But the gist was that it is certainly possible, mainly because of the nature of the kind of work we do (well, that he does and I aspire to do.)

The first step, of course, is to do the work.

I have a commission that I haven't even really started yet, a St. Anne and the Virgin. I'd like to do a test to see if I can complete an entire tile-painting in one week. That would make the price range sensible in terms of the ratio of hours put in to money earned, keeping the work affordable to the target market and at the same time make it worth doing in terms of time spent.

I've got a few models from the High Gothic I've picked out for the project. I've got the tile selected and prepped. But haven't started the work.

Why is painting so much more intimidating than writing? It's not like I don't know at least the basic techniques. I haven't really thought about it deeply, but there is an odd fear of making art. Someone wrote a helpful book about it. I'm glad at least to know I'm not the only one who experiences this.

Anyway, as with everything else that you think you ought to do but are scared to try, the only way to get past it is to actually do it. So, I'm going to try the 1-week experiment this week.



~

O Magnum Mysterium

This was the first piece of sacred polyphony I ever sang in a choir.

Doing this, you forget everything earthly. For just a moment, no worldly thing matters. No worldly thing even exists.



~

Painting fruit

Enel, Italy's government-sponsored power monopoly... yay socialism! (Italy has the highest electricity costs In. The. World!) was "doing some work" near the house today so for the first half of the day I had no power, and of course no power means no water. So, not only no internet but no shower, no tea... Sounded to me basically like God instructing me to sit in the kitchen in my pajamas painting all morning.

Who am I to argue?



You can tell one thing for absolute suresies: I was taught properly how to draw, but really, really, super-duper NOT taught how to use watercolours.





The only painting instruction I ever had was in oils, so I instinctively try to do oils things with the paint, which mostly just doesn't work.

It's also very clear that a photo does not give the same information as your eye. This pic is actually quite different from what I'm looking at now. And of course, when the paint and paper have dried it will look even more different.


I think I've basically got the colours more or less matched. Cad yellow, burnt sienna, highlighted with a little bit of lemon yellow, greened up a little with a teeny dab of ultramarine (gouache) and the darker shadows in a bit of payne's grey.

But my watercolour technique is pretty much non-existent and it's hard to remember that you actually do a lot of things backwards with watercolours. You take paint off to make a highlight, instead of putting paint on top, for instance.

Well, for a first go I guess it's better than I was expecting. Now I let it dry completely and see if I can do some correcting. It's also funny how you can suddenly see things with a photo that you didn't notice just looking at it.

One of the things to learn: use the right kind of paper. This is just a page out of my sketchbook and it really would help not to be fighting the big puckers.

Now to walk away and come back later with a fresh eye.



~