The Robe
16 x 12
original
I pulled out the cherry blossom robe again in honor of spring and because I find that painting the same thing over and over forces me to look for new ways to depict it. This robe has inspired a lot of experimentation in palettes and paint applications.
The version at the bottom is how the painting looked after my first attempt. It was straight forward alla prima painting and I thought the result was "ok" - which is damning with faint praise.
The biggest issue was the sap green background. That was an experiment in transparent darks that didn't end up suiting my aesthetic. Sap is a transparent pigment and its rich color and glassy transparency looked unpleasant, refusing to integrate with the opacity and impasto of the figure and robe. The piece wasn't bad enough to scrape off, so I let it dry and thought about it for a couple of weeks.
A clue for the next step came from the upper right corner of the painting in which I'd scumbled some cool, opaque gray. Scumbling is a technique in which a thin, broken layer of opaque or semi-opaque paint is dry brushed over existing paint. Merriam Webster says it makes a painting "less brilliant"; they got that right.
I scumbled over the sap and liked the effect so much that I kept on going and went over the robe.
The figure felt too misty and floaty at that point and I'd lost my darks, so I added the grounding dark shape at the bottom and put in the red line because it seemed the thing to do. Since it was going over dry paint, I could always remove it if it didn't work out. It might be there for keeps because it hasn't bothered me yet. Time will tell.
I don't know how long this robe series will go on. Months pass between each piece but it eventually draws me back when I have a hankering for a subject that combines both figurative and still life. It has a lot to teach me.
Happy painting!
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