A Tewa Pottery Pit Firing

As our course in the art of Tewa pottery drew to a close at the end of our week-long seminar at Common Ground on the Hill, I became increasingly excited about the pit firing. Would we actually dig a pit? And where would we do this on school property? To my amazement, our "pit" turned out to be a makeshift kiln constructed directly on top of the asphalt parking lot behind the studio. Kathy and Gilbert Sanchez began laying down metal strips directly on the asphalt, then placed what looked like an extra large metal cookie sheet on top of that. Tin can were placed upside down on top of that and the sheet was loaded up with cedar kindling. The empty spaces were filled up with cedar chips. A grate was put on top of that and then lined with more metal sheets. All the old metal and tin surprised me. I was expecting something much more earthy. The burnished pots were placed upside down on the metal sheets. Then a second tier was placed on top of that and the rest of the pottery was stacked one on top of the other on level two. The pots were quite small so a number of them fit into this box of metal stoked with cedar chips. There were some tall corner pieces of metal that held side pieces of metal to make a small rectangular kiln. I asked if they built larger kilns in New Mexico and I was surprised when they said that they did not. Kathy and Gilbert explained that because of the risk of loss only small amounts of pots were fired at a time.
When the pots were all in the makeshift kiln box we lined the sides with locally obtained buffalo chips. They came in handy small pizza-sized pieces that were good for stacking.
After a charming ritual consisting of tossing corn meal onto the kiln and wishing for good luck, the fire was lit. Between the wish for good luck and the burning of the fire, Kathy and Gilbert prepared us for accepting whatever the fire might bring our way. So much is beyond the artist’s control in this type of firing. A pot could explode. The flames lick their own design on a pot. We had an object lesson here is relinquishing desire to fate and to accept whatever the fire gives us.
The fire was very good to us - in large part of course because of the skills of teachers - who knew exactly when to smother the flames with the dung. Since this was a reduction firing, the dried dung took the oxygen out of the kiln atmosphere, turning the red pottery black. There were no breakages from the firing process and everyone had beautiful glossy vessels. I had to teach when the fire was cooled down and the pots removed but one of my fellow students kept coming into my classroom to report on the vessels as they were removed from the ash. Her excitement as she described each one was practically infectious. It was almost like a report on multiple births.
What was particularly interesting about the result of the firing is that some pots had flashpoints on them from areas where air got into the kiln and reoxidized the vessels. In these areas the pots became red again. I made a functioning clay whistle which came out from the ashes with a red spot at the tip where a design in slip radiated out. I could not have asked for a better gift from the fire.

The Art of Tewa Pottery

As an undergraduate at Douglass College in New Jersey, I took a ceramics classes with Ka Kwong Hui, a professor who led me to his teacher in China some years later. Although two dimensional art was to become my mainstay, I developed a genuine admiration for ceramic art and have to this day continued to surround myself with examples of this craft.
Most students of ceramic start with hand-built pottery and eventually "graduate" to the wheel. I followed that routine as well even though my heart was more in coils, slabs and pinch pots. There was one famous builder of hand-built coiled potter that I admired and wished to know more about. The black pots of Maria Martinez stood austerely out from the pages of ceramicists past in our student textbooks. I puzzled over how she got them so perfectly symmetrical without a wheel and how that glossy black metallic sheen on them came about. I imagined myself coiling these lovely shapes and burnishing them to a high polish. What would it be like, I wondered, to make pots with Maria Martinez? I wished that I could.
Little could I know that three decades later I would make pots with the grandchild and great grandchild of Maria Martinez. The opportunity came to me as one of the perks of being a member of the teaching faculty in the Common Ground on the Hill Program at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. The course was indeed a dream come true. I was finally able to satisfy my curiosity about how those black shiny pots are made.
The course started out with a few rituals on human interconnectedness and reverence for the sky and earth. There was also a film shown about Maria Martinez and her family, some of which was told in the native Tewa Pueblo language. Kathy (Wanpov) and Gilbert Sanchez had us first make the clay by hand with 50% clay mined from New Mexico and 50% volcanic ash mixed slowly with water to a malleable consistency. The Sanchez’s were extraordinarily neat and clean about their work. We kneaded our little portions of red clay on pieces of used blue jeans that were cut into surprisingly uniform rectangles. The compulsive part of me was very happy about that. When we managed to form our clay into a uniform ball we slammed it gently and repeatedly onto the hard table surface to make certain it was compact. We were then told to pinch off about a quarter of the ball and form it into a small pinch pot in a clay form called a puki. The rest of the pot was built up in coils on top of that base.
The forming of this pot was full of unexpected surprises and discoveries. I had always thought of ceramic pots needing to be thin-walled even if hand built. But the Tewa tradition has a pot built up with rather thick walls due to the subsequent scraping and sanding down of the vessel. I found that I liked the smell of this earthy clay. The texture took some getting used to. It wasn’t as resilient as commercial earthenware clays and therefore was not adaptable to long stretching or pulling out of forms. We were told that the rigors of the burnishing and pit firing would cause thin extensions from forms to break off. So the limits of the medium to a large degree influenced the design - especially when it came to figures like the small animals the artists made which tended to be stream-lined and compact.
After the pot was finished there were several steps involved in revising and finishing the shape. The general shaping was done with either a commercial pottery tool or pieces of natural gourds. I used a natural gourd to shape the pot pictured on the right. After the clay set up to a stage I know as "leather hard" the post was scraped. The Sanchez’s used ordinary every day items for the scraping such as melon ball scoops for the interiors of pots and lids from metal tins for the outside. The Sanchez’s very meticulously gathered the scrapings from everyone’s pottery and preserved them in a plastic bag for future use. It made me feel that this was indeed clay worth its weight in gold..
We were encouraged to allow the clay to "speak to us" rather than try to dictate a shape to it. This was helpful because my first vessel, a pear shaped bottle with an oddly shaped stopper, evolved from my intention to make a bowl. After getting a better feel for the clay, however, I was able to reproduce the forms of my ideas. I did find myself wanting to make more and more things and noticed a little reluctance from our maestros to have us make too many items. Just one day later it became very clear as to why. The shaping and scraping went rather expeditiously but the next step was much more time-consuming. Each vessel had to be sanded down and then wet wiped smooth ( it was interesting to note that the clay dust from the sanding was discarded as potentially contaminated with grit from the sandpaper).
The next step in the Tewa pottery process was the addition of slip and the burnishing. The Sanchez’s had us apply the slip with a strip of cloth. I found this a little awkward and eventually had to use a brush on subsequent pieces. The pottery required three to four coats of red slip with an application of lard on top of the last coat. The lard was used to keep the slip moist enough to work but I accidentally found that one of the pots burnished to a high sheen without the addition of the lard - possibly because the more humid climate of the northeast kept the slip moist longer than arid New Mexico.
We burnished our pottery with smooth polished stones. The best stones to use were ones without pits. Flaws in the stones could scrape the delicate surface of the pottery. It was interesting to learn that some of the most coveted stones for burnishing for the Sanchez group of potters were gastroliths. These are stones that were swallowed by dinosaurs and slowly tumbled around in their guts to create a smooth polished surface. I recall seeing examples of these in the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia and thinking how much I would like to have one to burnish my pottery with. I still have my eyes on the white one in the glass case on the second floor of the museum.
Burnishing pottery is a labor intensive process. I was up until about 11 PM for two consecutive nights polishing my little creations. But two other ambitious classmates and I made a party of it - one of them bringing ice cream sandwiches, cookies, and a plethora of candies. There is nothing like a sugar high and polishing pots to bring out a feeling of camaraderie and joy - even giddiness. Gilbert and Kathy Sanchez were very generous with their time in coming out to the studio late at night to join us some evenings. Suffice it is to say that a good time was had by all.
The last step before firing the pots was the addition of slip decoration. Slip decoration was added on top of a burnished pot to create lines and shapes that would remain dull in contrast to the high sheen. This was how Maria Martinez made those gorgeous black on black designs. Another surprise here was that the slip was applied with brushes made from yucca plants. Since the Sanchez’ wanted to give us the genuine Tewa pottery experience, we made our own yucca brushes. The strips of the yucca were soaked until the end was softened. The fibers of the plant were separated by chewing on the end of the yucca stick. These fibers were then trimmed to the desired shape. When it came time to apply my slip decoration, however, I forgot my yucca brush and used a Chinese paint brush instead. As a painter, it was tempting to paint a complicated design on the surface of a pot. But I held back from that, putting a simple design on just one item, ragging onto the bottle as an experiment, and leaving the rest with a plain shiny unadulterated surface. My simple unadorned pot in the upper right corner of this post is the result of this approach.
Next post: The pit firing

The Art of Tewa Pottery - Slow is Sometimes Better

This summer marks an intense season of courses taught and courses taken. I taught courses in mosaic art and the art of Chinese Brush painting and calligraphy at McDaniel College and had the unique opportunity to study Tewa Pueblo black ware pottery from the grandchild and great-grandchild of the famous potter Maria Martinez.
Teaching and learning these art forms was as mysterious as it was engaging. On both sides it required patience, dedication and persistence. It was most effective when students and teachers alike were able to lose themselves in the process of molding the stuff of art into personal expression.
The ovoid pottery pictured at right is a master work by my teacher, Kathy (Wanpovi) Sanchez. It was produced in a pit-fire with a partial reduction process - where the smothering of flames by dried dung turns the red pottery black. The small lines on the vessel were etched in after the firing and appear to follow the natural flash points on the clay. The circular pattern in the center is a feather motif drawn in slip decoration before the firing. Ms. Sanchez often embellishes the pottery after firing with additions of coral or turquoise, as seen here. I admire the sparing way these focal points of gemstones are arranged.
I like to think of this vessel as a soul’s journey - the faintly drawn lines evoke mythological presences like figures in a dream. All is nebulous and subtle with flashes of mica adding sparks of energy to the otherwise sleepy relaxed feel of the burnished clay. This July I got a feel for what it meant to make slow pottery like this precious object - with hours of pinching coiling and burnishing devoted to a single small hand held pot. There were great lessons learned in this course about slowing down and putting the time and market economy way of thinking behind - at least temporarily. Stay tuned for my next blog on the process of creating the Tewa pottery.

Hot Summer Art

For the last few weeks, I’ve been absorbed by my job as an arts educator - so much so that there was no time to create my own new works or to write. But the time spent sharing my knowledge with others was rewarding. I will be traveling and teaching for the next few weeks and will probably not be painting, sculpting and writing again until August.
In the mean time, I am posting a few samples of the works of my students in the Reach Summer Arts program at Sumter High School. The students were engaging and their work is a testament to their talents and abilities.
In a time of extreme budget cuts for the arts, we made these mosaics with mostly recycled materials. We started with discarded matt board from the refuse bins of picture framers. The large pieces were cut into standard sizes for mounting art work on - 10" x 12" and 12" squares. The other scraps were sized on the white side with gesso and then faux finished with acrylic paints. Using scraping, ragging, stippling and trailing techniques, the painted boards gradually took on the appearance of precious rocks and fine textiles. When dry, these were cut into squares, rectangles, haphazard pieces and strips. Using PVA white glue, the pieces were assembled in various mosaic styles.
For subject matter, I had the students extrapolate from two sources. The first source were fused glass pieces of the student’s own making. The other source was clippings of paintings from art magazines. I had the students take these focal points and create a world around them. When possible, I used objects from the students’ previous art projects - like those beautiful fused glass flattened bottles that their art teacher, Heidi Adler, helped them create. One of these is featured in the mosaic piece above by Lexi Melton. The reverse side of this and some of the other glass pieces has been treated with silver-leaf in order to block the background color of the matt board and to enhance the iridescence of the glass.
I like the approach that many of the students used in completing their projects and marveled at how their individual aesthetic approaches shaped the final product. The strange but exuberant collage surrounding a picture of a kimono by Bryan O'Connor is a study in a controlled chaotic fantasy of Asia. The heart motif could have been a cliche, if not for the variety of cuts and the skill in their assembly. The heart sealed with an x by Angel Rodriguez becomes more of an icon than a valentine. The tree with madonna is by Amitra Simonson.
I continue to prepare for a series of summer camp jobs - the summer is my busiest teaching season. It is a dizzying whirlwind of activity as I prepare to teach two more courses at McDaniel college. But as the sage painter, Ba Da Shan Ren once said, "teaching is half of learning," and I expect that my own artistic vistas will broaden as the result of all the hot summer art activities.

Memorial Day for GI Joe

G.I. Joe, the fighting man of the 1960's, with his pistol wielding hands and paddle boat feet, had a pink scar upon his face. I always wanted to erase it. So when I painted his portrait I did leave it out, but put a highlight in its place.

I had a small collection of G.I. Joes as a child in addition to the Barbie entourage I wrote about previously. As I found the Ken doll suspect, Barbie’s consort of the day was the military man, if only so that she could borrow his neat jeep.
To paint the G. I. Joe portrait I altered the lighting on his face so that he was illuminated from below - brightening eye sockets that would ordinarily be in shadow. This gives his face a somewhat less than benign appearance. It is Vincent Price lighting, to be sure. One doesn’t know whether he is terrified himself or is frightening to others.
During my recent exhibition, "Homage to Squares," which closed last week, Joe was hung separately from the other doll portraits, but just around the corner from them. It gave the impression that he was ogling them from a short distance, with surprise and indignation, perhaps?
This little square portrait was different from the female doll heads in that Joe did not get a metal leaf background but a painted one with metallic paint instead. The paint was mottled to look something like battle camouflage. G. I. Joe, once again is at our service.

Fashioning a Barbie

Extra care requires making extra parts. When creating the square painted papers for my collage "Sleeping Standing Up," I made several extra 4" squares of paper sized with light blue gesso. After painting most of them and placing my select few onto the large work, I had to do something with the rest. What to do with about ten extra sized pieces of blue paper? The answer came from an unlikely source - a vintage Barbie doll collection. I had brought the dolls out of storage with the intent of selling them off. But before parting with them, I thought it best to paint them first. I sized gold and silver leaf onto paper and carefully traced the shape of the dolls’ heads onto the gilded and silver leafed surfaces. I then cut out the shape and stored these for later use. I mounted the silver and gold with the cut out shapes on to the blue gesso paper. I built a textured paper frame around the leaf - pink for silver and brown with blue for gold. I then carefully painted these iconic doll faces on each square page. There was the Barbie with the bubble hair bob from 1963. There was a fashion Barbie with a strange headress with gold stripes. A Skipper doll was also immortalized in acrylic paint on paper, as was Barbie of the late sixties. G I Joe made an appearance as well - the only man so far in the little square doll portraits.
Despite their design to appeal, the faces looked almost ghoulish to me - the overly long necks with eyes too blue, noses too small, and mouths too demure. Painting them caused me to reflect upon standards of feminine beauty. Despite the "improvements" to Barbie throughout the years, I found that my preference leaned towards her earliest incarnations - the design adapted directly from Lily the fetish doll. There was a remotely Oriental look to her, with those narrow eyes askance. Perhaps I had a nostalgia for a fifties era that I was not a part of. Or perhaps I was just intrigued by the idea of painting an image of something meant for men that ironically became the provenance of little girls.
How arbitrary and fleeting are concepts of beauty. This very mutability of the desirable is what I find so fascinating. What creates a desire for certain proportions and a predilection for a narrow range of coloring? I look at these Barbie dolls and despite their appeal, seem to mock our choices - holding a mirror up to our tastes and finding them bizarre with the passage of years.

Sleeping Standing Up

My "Homage to Squares" exhibition turned out to be elaborate and complex. It took me and three volunteers two vehicles to get the art and installation set up to the site and eight hours to hang the show. Thank God for friends! Heart felt thanks go out to Julia Wolfe, Pierce West and Kevin Smith. I could not have done this without them.
Interestingly, my friends often had a better idea than I did about how to hang much of the work. This does not surprise me. I just create the art - displaying it is yet another art. Pierce West especially had good ideas about what to use in focal points and how to arrange things so that they would read like a long narrative, as in the case of the thirty small figurative paintings and their accompanying poems. Kevin and Pierce rearranged my long line of Barbie Doll portraits separate from the single portrait of G.I. Joe. So instead of being a part of this group, he was a counterbalance to it - like a long story with a punch line to it.
After an exhausting day of hanging art, I spent the day before the Friday opening busying myself preparing food. In keeping with the theme most things were square - fudge brownie squares, lemon squares and pecan squares to name a few. Opening night on Friday was surprisingly crowded, with most of the food and all of the wine consumed by the throngs. Again I am grateful for the savvy publicity from the Gallery 80808 webmaster, Susan Lenz.
Preparations for this exhibition have been so consuming that my intent to write about the art has been somewhat curtailed. Nevertheless, I will manage to write for a while about the work in this exhibition. With about eighty pieces hanging in this show, there is plenty to write about. With work ranging in dates of completion from early last decade to just last week, the show turned out to be something like a small retrospective. The most recent work, "Sleeping Standing Up," featured at the top of this page, was finished just last week. The picture is a collage on canvas comprised of a figure excised from a previous painting that met up with an unfortunate studio accident. ( I had written about this in a previous blog when I first cut the standing man out of the painting.) I had salvaged the figure by cutting him out of the painting and pasting him onto a new canvas. It took a long time to get back to the image of this man, which had remained rolled up in a closet for several months as I attended to my daily routines and weekly deadlines. As the deadline for completing new work for my exhibition drew near, I feared that I would not be able to carve out a niche of time to complete this larger, elaborate piece. But I found a sufficient block of time after all, in the final week before my show.
In this new version of "Sleeping Standing Up," I outlined the figure by squeezing a tube of scarlet paint around the contours of his body. I did this for both pragmatic and aesthetic reasons. Using a sold line instead of collaged fragments of paper as in the rest of the work, highlighted the subject in a bold and provocative way. The thick paint also served to hide the seam created by a heavy piece of canvas pasted on top of another canvas.
This mosaic collage, like most of my others, was not laid out in entirety then adhered to the substrate. Instead the process was more intuitive - colors and patterns revealing themselves as I worked along the surface. There were many surprises along the way - like the pink quilt-like border, and the large blue squares. A commentator thought there was a symbolic intent to the pink color - a threat to the masculinity of the subject. This was an interesting concept but was not in the forefront of my intentions. The pink just mysteriously resonated with me.
I hung "Sleeping Standing Up" at the end of the long hallway leading to my exhibition because I wanted it to be an iconic focal point. There are many things one could say about the brazen colors and the torpor of his presence. With the economic downturn, and so much of life turned upside down - lost retirements, state ownerships of what we used to consider the apogee of capitalistic institutions. This season brought with it a sense of sleepwalking - because so much of what we thought was real was not.
"Sleeping Standing Up" serves now as the greeter to the door of my exhibition. Unfortunately he will have to come down the day after tomorrow. Such a brief exhibition with such a long theme!

Plagiarism in the Past Perfect Tense

My upcoming exhibition is a patchwork of old and new work. The square painting turned towards a diamond shape to the right is a self portrait untimely torn from a painting I made years ago while I was still living in China. I didn’t really like the awkward composition in the original work so I salvaged the face (for historic reasons?) by excising it with a utility knife and then discarding the remaining canvas. I then pasted the portrait on to a gesso panel. Using a slightly updated palette of colors and an older painter’s way of wielding the brush, I surrounded the old image with new paint. It still has a somewhat naive early Lucian Freud look to it, but I will be exhibiting it anyway.
I am reminded again of Proust’s observation that when artist’s reach a certain age they begin to plagiarize from their own past, which explains the first word in the title of this little painting.
The second half of the title, "the past perfect tense," is an overlay of puns, historical references, and an interest in the cultural ramifications of linguistics. It is all word play. Through the rose colored lenses of the present, is the golden age of youth, with its seeming simplicity, a time yet untainted with responsibilities and limitations? Is the past perfect? Or was it really fraught with the tensions of uncertainties? Perfectly tense, maybe. Tenses do speak volumes about the cultures that invent and use them. It seems to me that the past perfect is a language of regret...
"If I had gone to medical school instead of art school, then I would have been much better off financially."
Staring into the face of the past through this little self portrait, I recalled wondering at the time, how I would feel looking into the mirror a few decades later, as an older woman, particularly considering the high premium our culture places upon youth. Surprisingly, it is more annoying than distressing - especially having skin hang down from my face while standing upside-down.
I suppose the mere fact that I bother to walk around on my hands in an old-age-be-damned attitude is its own answer to the trepidation one should be feeling at this time. And the young, rather than evoking feelings of loss or jealousy, elicit charm. Sometimes they look like little dolls to me. Even my own visage from those decades past is doll-like, with that narrow little face and those big staring, almond eyes. But the older face that looks back upon it has some regrets but does not mourn. It only exhales in relief at having survived the vicissitudes of the life lived since then and grateful for the experience gained.

La Mei

The large commission that I wrote about in my previous blog is finally complete. "La Mei," the plum blossom of the winter, does retain the atmospheric quality of the initial grisaille but it was not without some whiting out and repainting of select areas of the surface. The spots of yellow at the base, originally elliptical, became increasing rounded as the painting progressed. The upper right corner was painted in a very gestural way, then tightened up, then trimmed up and loosened again. This is probably what the Abstract Expressionist meant by the dynamics of "push and pull" in a painting, even though this one is more Oriental than Occidental in feeling.
Because the dimensions of the painting are roughly a square, the work will probably appear in my upcoming exhibition, "Homage to Squares," as a surprise to myself as well as everyone else who expects to see only figurative work. The painting is too large for me to get far enough away from it in order to get a complete image, but the detail illustrated here gives a general idea of the use of paint and composition.
Since the opening of "Homage to Squares" is less than two weeks away, I will devote the next series of blog posts to the square paintings featured in this exhibition.

Ideas Written Large

Large Ideas, Limited Budgets and Engineering Challenges
My clients had a problem area in their home - a large recessed area with a dubious- looking Asian painting pasted directly to the wall. The painting had become water damaged in areas and was unsightly. They wanted to have something cover this area of about eight feet by seven feet but didn’t want to remove the painting. My clients also wanted any art work covering this area to be easily removable for eventual transport to a new location. Lastly, the project budget amounted to what I would typically charge for something about a quarter of that size.
The problem of what to do within these constraints was bantered about for a few years. A large, lightweight, easily removable artwork seemed to point to fiber art - something that could roll up. But my clients couldn’t find a fiber art piece that suited both taste and budget. A large canvas would have to be put on an equally large frame which would make it not easily transportable. P A mosaic would be too heavy and a collage would take too long. So what I finally settled on was a painting on cotton duck canvas that would be attached to a large diameter dowel and rolled up like a scroll. To keep material costs down I proposed a minimalist approach to composition and colors- using mostly whites. A number of years ago, I had created a series of white, atmospheric paintings with touches of biomorphic details for an exhibition at the Lancaster Museum. The originals were sold off here and there a long time ago but I had images in my archive which I e-mailed to my clients. They settled on a particular composition that I could adjust to a much larger scale.
There was an Asian theme in the room where the large painting would hang so I brought everything in my Chinese art training to the fore in the execution of this project. For structure, I dismantled a damaged Chinese scroll to see exactly how the painting was attached and wrapped around the wood piece at the bottom. It was not simply rolled around the bottom but attached around the back of the scroll with the wood hanging somewhat like a sling. This clever arrangement enabled the scroll to hang flat against the wall and roll up easily. I decided to pattern my own canvas scroll after this design. Such little details like this make such big differences.
Preparing a canvas eight feet tall by eight feet wide that would hang freely turned out to require great patience and some engineering skills. First, the canvas had to be hemmed around the outside except for the piece that would wrap around the wooden dowel. The top had to be looped around to create a space for a removable rod from which to hang it - something like a curtain. This all required finding a seamstress with an industrial grade sewing machine. Through a well-connected artist friend I found just the person in a nearby town. Of course this meant somewhat of a delay getting started as I was dependent upon her getting around to the project when moved to do so but it did get done.
After squaring the canvas I then connecting the bottom to the wooden dowel with PVA white glue Priming the canvas was another challenge. I could not staple the canvas to a conventional stretcher because staples, or tack holes would show up around the seamed edge. So I ironed out the canvas as best I could and primed it carefully on top of painter’s paper. It was a mess. The paper underneath became moist and buckled, which caused the large canvas to crease as well. Not knowing how else to get a better surface I decided to use two by fours and L-brackets to make a large scale frame. I solved the problem of the stapling by stretching the canvas over the frame with contractor’s tape - twisting it and then taping it to the floor with a second piece of tape. After priming, the tape seemed to hold for most parts but I ended up having to buttress the dowel - wrapped end with another piece of lumber. For days my commission looked like it was a patient in traction but I got a good surface.
For a painting this size that would rest in a small room, I thought it would be best for it to be a light as possible - like bright sun on snow. I thought of the paintings one of my professors used to make years ago at Chinese art school. Master Gao was particularly fond of painting La Mei - a kind of Chinese plum blossom that had waxy yellow flowers that would open in the middle of winter. After he painted various intensities of yellow spots on the xuan paper, Master Gao would the prepare washes of pale orange and blue. The washes always looked like a sky in winter. Master Gao would then splatter the whole page with white gouache that he would liberally fling from his brush like Jackson Pollock.
I did something reminiscent of this Chinese master when working on this large canvas by slowly building up washes of greys, metallic silvers and earth tones. While still wet, I scrubbed in a variety of textures, using rags, brooms and windshield cleaners. It was the first time that I actually broke out a sweat while painting. Every gesture with the brush, fingers or other instruments had to be made quickly because I was painting in acrylic. After adding the washes and textures, I painted in a blizzard by flinging and dripping silver, white and cream. Painting on this scale with such vigor was a joy. I was happy to have a large commission and to feel to totally absorbed by the process of painting.
I am now beginning the finishing touches. There will be more solid areas but the challenge now will be to add structure without losing the atmosphere. I am looking forward to Monday, when I can dedicate another full day to this project.