Author: Charles

I’m continuing to work with the color tempera, it has some interesting properties. Lately I’ve been thinking about one of Leonardo daVinci’s painting lessons. He described how to build the structure of foliage and trees by laying down layers of bright and dark. I’ve used that lesson a lot in abstract painting, my work sometimes deals with fields of color putting “visual pressure” forward or backwards. My work isn’t about trees or foliage, but I tend to work in blue-green colors so people always assume that it is. But it’s not. Anyway, this painting is still in the underpainting stage, far less than halfway to being anything. I like the color tempera, and this size of paper works pretty well for me, but I have to mix huge amounts of pigments. Color mixing is working pretty well, better than I expected. I bought a nice Italian signpainter’s brush, it was cheap, and works great at this scale.

I took a little longer break than I’d planned but now I’m back in the studio. I decided to work in color, and on a larger size of paper. This all means more work. I have never worked with color tempera at this size, I’ll see how this goes but it could all end up in the trash.

To my surprise, I decided this painting was finished, so I took the tape off the edges and unmounted it. It looks pretty good. I decided it was too boring for viewers to watch me paint in black and white, and I was getting bored too. But I thought it turned out pretty good. And I decided to give the equipment a rest. It’s 11PM and it’s 90 degrees outside, it’s going to be even hotter tomorrow, time to conserve some energy and let the equipment rest a day or so. I’ll start a new painting Monday. In the meantime, I laid the painting right on the scanner, so I can show you an actual-size detail, you can see a tiny bit of what I’m up to. I’ll try to get a digital camera or something, to show the whole image.

I’m back at work. I’ve been leaving the video zoomed in so you can see the detail, but it’s still too blurry to see what I’m really doing. I’ll see if I can get some hirez scans when the work is done, so you can see the final result. I looked at the detail video, it looks like black and white video, but that’s because I’m working in black and white. Working in B/W is harder than working in color, and not nearly as much fun. Color can be a crutch sometimes, you can distract people from the problems in your painting with colors. But in B/W, all the flaws are just as distinct as the good bits, so you have to fix things or it all falls apart. I went to the art store and looked at some colored tempera, but they were out of stock on important primary colors, so there would be no way to mix colors properly. I could use acrylics, but I hate using acrylics, if I go to that trouble, I might as well work in oil.

The first time I looked at the painting today, I liked it a lot more than when I was painting on it last night. It looks a lot brighter, I was working more in midtones, with a looser, wetter brushwork in spontaneously mixed greys. It’s progressing well, but still a long way to go.

Lately I have a bit of pain in my right arm from tendonitis, and it’s painful to paint. I’ve been hauling big buckets of water from my sink to my garden, I had to start lifting the buckets with my left arm because it hurt too much. I wonder how much 5 gal of water weighs? I took some Alleve which is good for deep tendon pain, it should kick in soon and I’ll start painting.

I think I’ll go down to the art supplies store about 4PM today and get some new brushes. The ones I’m using are too small for this size of paper, and not enough variation in size. I have some huge brushes but they’re too big. Hmm.. Maybe I should just buy bigger paper, that would be a lot cheaper. I’d rather work larger. For that matter, I’d rather be working on more than one piece at once, so I could continue to paint on one while the other dried. I prepared a couple of boards like this so I could switch to another board. But I just don’t have enough space to do it. It reminds me of an old story I heard about Basquiat. He’d work on one painting at a time, focusing on that until he was finished. Then he hired an assistant, who saw him working. He told Basquiat that everyone works on multiple works at the same time, and his job as assistant was to prep canvases and move stuff around so he could do that. Suddenly Basquiat’s output exploded, and his works started referring to each other in a wonderful way.


7:10PM – I bought some new brushes, boy is it expensive to buy wide soft bristle brushes. I’ll work in the studio more tonight, so stay tuned. You’re invited to open the stream and just leave it running. I figure people actually want to see me paint, so I’ll leave a monitor running, and if anyone is connected, I’ll make an effort to paint. But the stream monitor only updates once a minute, so you’ll have to stay connected for over a minute before I could possibly notice it.

StudioCam is now broadcasting live, the project has begun. Now you will be able see me painting. And when I say you will see me painting, I mean mostly you will see paint drying. I spend far more time looking at my painting than actually painting. But you will be able to check in over time and see how the painting is progressing. Painting is a slow process.


I’ve got my paper mounted and have started to paint. I like to staple paper to a board and put tape around the edges, so when I finish, it has a nice clean white frame. My photography background is obvious. I’m working in black and white mixed media, using tempra, sumi ink, and various watercolors and gouache. I’m working strictly abstractly, which is the hardest way to paint. At this point, it makes little difference to me how the painting looks, most of this will be covered up and repainted 5 or 6 times before I even get an idea where I’m going.

2:40PM – Working in water media is slow, I have to wait for the paper to dry before I can paint further. This forces me to work more like printmaking, planning the image in layers of a single color of paint. I’m more accustomed to oil painting, where you can work wet on wet and get really good effects. I always try to work with water media like it was oil paint. I remember a long chat with Brice Marden that put me onto this theme. Well, I mostly remember it, we both had too way much to drink. But anyway, I asked him about his Cold Mountain drawings, and he said he liked the immediacy of drawing in ink, how it was like calligraphy in that your first mark was the final mark. But in oil painting, you can continuously work the image until it’s perfect, you can even scrape it down and start over. I decided to prove him wrong, and work on a single sheet of paper continuously, to work the paper and ink as hard as oil paints. Unfortunately, it’s almost as much work as oil painting. More, really, since you have to go to a LOT more work to get nice transparent effects. I wish streaming video had more resolution, it’s impossible to see these effects in the tiny, blurry video image. I just found a way to pump up the rez by killing the blank audio and using full bandwidth for video. I’ll see how it works. When I stop working and take a break, I’ll leave the camera zoomed in so you can see some details.

5:45PM – I’m back in the studio, I’ll do more work on this painting tonight, over the next few hours.

The StudioCam is live and available for testing. Please click and see if the picture is visible (there is no audio). If anyone comments that they can see the signal, I will begin the project.

Update 9:25PM Apple has just officially released QuickTime 6 and QuickTime Broadcaster. Some features of the Preview Edition may have been disabled, which could explain the streaming problems. I’m upgrading and reconfiguring now, and will continue to work until streaming goes live.

Update 11:15PM The new QuickTime 6 release seems to work, but retains compatibility with QuickTime 5. I will leave the stream running, please click the comment link and let me know if you see the video. Note that you may need to click Play a second time before the stream will start.


(Test successful, links to video removed)