Over the last month I have been working on a larger than usual painting, from a selection of close up stills of Johnny Depp as the character William Blake in ´Dead Man´ by Jim Jarmusch.
You can see the IMDB entry for the film here:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112817/
I have been photographing the progress of the work every hour that I paint and am updating the photo album on my Facebook page every week.
You can view the album here:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.191153577614915.50355.100001608235765
I am also writing a journal of the painting:
William Blake Day 1
I arrived at the studio just after 10.30, all set to start the painting. After just 4 hours, I´d finally decided to paint his skin pale green, because it´s a colour I know I can blend other colours into to create the form of the cheekbones (which I knew I´d need to do to make him recognisable), and use Prussian blue. The dilemma was between Prussian blue and Cadmium Red deep and I spent an extraordinary amount of time deciding which one would work best. I was inspired to use Prussian blue by a painting by Mimei Thompson who uses it in a subtle and delicate way, particularly in this painting:
http://www.mimeithompson.com/portfolio/index.php?work=425
Mimei was one of the artists I showed with in June at the 11:11 exhibition.
Within a couple of hours I remembered how overwhelming Prussian blue can be and added in some Davy´s grey. I have used Davy´s grey before for underpainting and like how weak it is for this purpose, so it´s interesting for me to use it on top for a change.
William Blake Day 5
Since then, the painting has changed significantly in both depth and colour and I have painted over most of the green skin with blue and changed from Prussian to Indanthrone blue – a softer option. I decided that the former colours were slightly too acidic after all. Perhaps Mimei´s success with Prussian blue is because she uses other much more organic colours than I do. It really didn´t work with my very man-made looking pastel green.
William Blake Day 8
I´m painting the second blue skin layer today. It´s incredibly hot in the studio (I´m in Valencia and it´s about 35 degrees outside) which is affecting the drying time of the paint. I need each layer to be completely dry before painting the next, and the heat and humidity mean that the layers aren´t drying as ´hard´ as I need. I can get over this by leaving it for a few extra days between layers, but wish I didn´t need to because it breaks the momentum and I want to see how it will look at the end...
By the end of the day, I start to like how the painting looks.
