ART & ALCHEMY, Old Master's Techniques's topics - tribe.net

Creating a ground for painting that will last

2008-01-10T18:21:41Z

oil paint ontop of acrylic gesso = bad
oil paint ontop of acrylic gesso on top of poor quality canvas = ultra disaster

Theres actually quite an art in just preparing a ground that will enable a painting to last longer than 15 years !
So, why not recreate the method of the old masters, to enable a painting to last that long ? Its only fair on the people who may buy the paintings afterall.

Heres two good resources on this matter :

www.true-gesso-panels.com/
"No painting technique is more anchored in tradition than egg-tempera. Practitioners value reliable materials and methods.
Our goal is to make an uncompromised, affordable gessoed panel available to the egg-tempera artist."

www.alessandrakelley.com/priming.html
good technical info

posted in ART & ALCHEMY, Old Master's Techniques - 12 replies

art magick

2007-10-14T14:26:01Z

http://www.artmagick.com/archive/artists/artist.aspx?artist=stillman

A nice site !

posted in ART & ALCHEMY, Old Master's Techniques - 0 replies

Novelty and Eternity

2007-10-14T14:12:57Z

I am interested in the crux between arts pursuit of originality in the light of timeless ideals.

We could say these 'timeless ideals' are 'Platonic' but they existed before Plato ! We could evoke the 'perenial philosophy', or 'comparative mythology', or the trans-cultural archetypes of Jung. We could talk about the anthropologists 'form constants', or the physicists concepts of 'self-organisation' and 'gravity basins'.

My point here is to delineate that the primordial categories of human experience are actually pretty unwavering. Deep in the structure of the human being, formed from highly conservative laws of Nature herself, ordained by some unfathomable principle beyond change and time (that which we honour with the name God, Nirvana, Light, Eternal Life), we find a collective and fundamental territory, the numinous, which stands outside of historicity and partakes of eternity.

The great passages of human life,gestation in the womb, birth, childhood, awakenings of adolescence, young adulthood, maturity, and old age will, if we're fortunate, be chapters we will pass through on our journey to the beyond. The unchanging fact of our mortality, our transience, is shared between all that lives. Sexuality and desire also exist as facts of our being. We find we can all categorise our emotional lives in similar ways.

Underneath cultural differences these are the unwavering axioms of being : the basic existential condition that we all have in common.

The most effervescent, high frequency states of being that we can achieve whilst embodied, the numinous experience of the sacred, the visionary, mystical experience, epiphany, the Sunyata, these glimpses, these steppingstones on our pilgrimage through life, also reveal deep commonalities across cultures. Therefore, the visionary artist must confront, in a historical epoch that pursues novelty, originality, newness, that his or her subject matter indeed portrays nothing that is new under the sun.

This line of thought relates me to some of Oleg Korolev's recent explorations of the place of visionary art in the modern art world/markets. In a market that is always seeking something new, there may be something almost provincial or conservative about the presentation of neo-religious or esoteric art, visionary art that attempts to represent in codified or symbolic ways the transformation of the inner being to enjoin the worlds of nature and the sacred in a gestalt of wholeness.

After all, was the mystical experience of the early 20th century symbolist in any fundamental way different than a mystical experience of the early 21st century ? Both take one beyond the historicity of the conditioned mind of the marketplace. What one finds beyond that conditioned mind is a realm of eternal, unchanging archetypes.

Or is it ? Like the zodiacal matrix of the stars, the archetypal drama is what bears upon and evokes the very conditions we find on earth. History is the standing wave of the collective consciousness. It is a kind of slow-moving, turgid crystalisation of the dominating values, ideals, hopes and fears of the race.

Visionary art can reflect profoundly upon this crossover space. Without being dictated to by the whims for a trivial newness, visionary art can always represent something about the human and more-than-human culture it is nested within. The very difference - or, the subtle interpenetrations - of the visionary and the secular, is ripe ground for creative fertilisation.

posted in ART & ALCHEMY, Old Master's Techniques - 2 replies

Discussion on Mische Technique - Edited

2007-07-29T12:22:24Z

The following technique was taught to Brigid in the mid-70's by Ernst Fuchs...

brigidmarlin.com/Pages/Mische.html

Timea :

Tthe use of pressed wood masonite - you can compare it to blotting paper - it is like a sponge - so if you use it (not recommended)-you need to be sured that you seal it with a glue or something else. A: to puffer it against humiditu and B: to prevent your binding media being sucked up by it - leaving your first coats deprived of binding medium. The great disadvantege of press boards are is that not only do they contain crappy chemicals (sometimes formaldehyde)and a possibly lousy glue -they are as mentioned very sensitive to climate changes (if you leave one in a moist celler -it will quickly crumble apart)- so it tends to extend when it is humid and shrink when it is dry - the colour on top - especially the tempera might crack during these processes and if there is not enough binding media or too much binding media- this cracking or craquelure leads to flaking.

On the images Brigid completely covers each chromatic layer with the next - which is one way to do it - The way I have seen it at the Academy in Vienna resembles the technique of the german artist Maximilian Pfalzgraf: to overpaint each layer - but not in a complete coating -but with the brush in a way that some of the underlying red colours keep shing through at the warm areas (cheek...) and some of the blues in the shadow areas (corner of the eyes, under ears....etc) and white where you want to have your middle tone such as the flesh colour in the face (carnation) standing up firmly...
see:
www.silosgallery.com/images/ca...nique.html

My conservation teacher in Vienna has been involved in the conservation work of the Fuchs paintings which were vandalised in the church of Hetzendorf - mische technique on parchment and those also showed some flaking (not too long after the actual making of them...)- the reason again might be that also parchment is strongly reactive to climate changes... ( www.pfarre-hetzendorf.at )

It seems to be worth to investigate for a stable, light and not too expensive support... Any ideas to this subject are most welcome...!

This link - is to the descriptions in English (-; - of the Fuchs' paintings on parchment
www.pfarre-hetzendorf.at/fuchs...-e.htm
I really do love parchment and the idea to paint on it ---

Daniel :

wow, Timea those links are extremely instructional !

Interestingly the difference between Brigid's and Pfalzgraf's mische approach is what I have been naturally experimenting with. In the archangel Michael piece I've moved from just mechanically applying the various full glazes of red yellow blue to working more locally.

It would seem, especially if these is a long wait between each layer, that laying one complete glaze across an entire piece, atop of each other, especially if the previous layer has already hardened, would create more suseptibility to rapid cracking, where as using slower drying glaze medium (more stand oil) so that the various layers and touches can bond with each other across levels would be overall stronger.

Brigid loves her Damar resin for the slickness it lends a glaze.

Again, thanks for those links. Maximilian Pfalzgraf's work is super and his pages are very exciting to read up on.

Timea :

I had a thought - while writing on my thesis - lead white...
Brigid uses "Titan white" a modern pigment (introduced around 1900) completely different from the only white pigment the old masters used - Flake white - (lead white produced with the stack method).

Lead white has some great advantages (beside that it is poisonous and hard to get...):
A: it greatly speeds up the drying process of oil
B: in combination with oil it creates a 'lead soap' when aging - later makes the layers more transparent after some time - so you would have a chromatic effect -your coloured layers would reflect through the white layers - whereas with Titan white you cover up what you have painted before...
Just an idea....

Before I made lead white- i talked to DR Kremer in Germany (colour mill) and I was suprised to hear that quite some painters make their lead white themselves...

Dammar - yes I agree - too much resin layers might have two disadvantages - they can become brittle and get dark with time (yellow - like the varnish on old paintings...)

I will have a chat with Nicola Costara about dammar --- she is the head of painting cons in the V&A and a great source of knowledge - and she mentioned tome time ago that it would be great to make a practical workshop...

posted in ART & ALCHEMY, Old Master's Techniques - 0 replies

Cennini

2007-07-28T22:28:32Z

http://www.noteaccess.com/Texts/Cennini/index.htm

amazing resource for traditional techniques

posted in ART & ALCHEMY, Old Master's Techniques - 2 replies

Camera Lucida, Obscura, etc

2007-06-08T11:34:51Z

http://www.snarkout.org/archives/2004/01/21/

An interesting hypothesis mainly pushed by David Hockney which connects advances in optics to how suddenly artists diverged from the gothic mold and got way-realistic and started developing a spacial universe in paintings...
Unfortunately the argument below dismisses the theory, but at least it describes its main tenants...

Obscura

The camera obscura is based on a simple principle. If you go into a dark room (thus the name, the Latin camera, "room", and obscura, "dark") and punch a small hole in the wall, the image outside will be projected inside. Francis Bacon understood the apparatus; Da Vinci described them in his notebooks; Frisius and Kepler used camera obscura projections to help perform their observations of the sun. The camera obscura became a staple of Victorian seaside resorts; one built in the 1940s at Cliff House in San Francisco provides a pleasant view of the elephant seal rocks. Recently, one controversial book suggested that Dutch master Johannes Vermeer may have used the camera obscura in his art. Certain hints of the perspective Vermeer used, the physical evidence suggesting that Vermeer was able to very accurately render objects' proportionally without measuring them, the apparent finding that many of Vermeer's paintings were made in the same room, and a tantalizing question of whether one object in a painting represents Vermeer's darkened booth all piqued architecht Philip Steadman's interest. The question isn't settled, and it may never be. For one thing, why wasn't Vermeer's lens, which would have been a rare and quite valuable item, recorded in his effects when he died? Vermeer, though a master painter and member of Delft's painters' guild, was primarily an art dealer, and could quite likely have afforded it, but would it have vanished out of history? But Steadman's thesis is nothing compared to that of painter and photographer David Hockney.

Hockney, a major British artist, had been puzzling over portraiture of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. How did Ingres' small -- often 12 inches by 18 inches -- and quickly drawn portraits have such a confident line? Then, he recounted in a New Yorker article on his theory, it hit him: "[O]ne morning, studying the blowups, I found myself thinking, Wait, I've seen that line before. Where have I seen that line? And suddenly I realized, That's Andy Warhol's line." Hockney thought that Ingres had been quickly tracing a projected image, as Warhol did on many of his paintings. Eventually Hockney came to the conclusion that Ingres had been using a camera lucida ("bright room") to set down quickly a sketch of key points of the face, and had been concealing his use of the device. An artist might hide his use of mechanical aids; the nineteenth century American realist painter Thomas Eakins worked from photographs and took some pains to conceal the fact.

Hockney worked with the camera lucida, a sort of prism on a stick, to demonstrate that the technique was viable. Ross Woodrow, a lecturer in art at Australia's University of Newcastle, strongly disputes Hockney's take on things (and even what Hockney asserts is the pseudo-photographic nature of his portraits), but this is a viable approach to demonstrating that a wild theory is at least a practical wild theory. Thor Heyerdahl may not have proved anything about Polynesian sailing, but at least he demonstrated that his idea would have worked. Then, however, Hockney got religion. He started seeing what he felt were unmistakable signs of the use of advanced optics everywhere; in van Ecyk's work, in Holbein's The Ambassadors (with its anamorphic skull), in the Mona Lisa. He began to assert that the entire Renaissance revolution in painting, the improvement in technique that occured after around 1420, could best be understood as a revolution in optics. Painters in the Renaissance didn't necessarily understand perspective better, Hockney argued; they simply had access to concave mirrors that they could use to project images onto the canvas.

The French biographer and perspective theorist Jean-Francois Niceron (whose work Marcel Duchamp claimed inspired his own), roughly a contemporary of Vermeer's, had mused about using the camera obscura as an artist's tool. Vermeer lived near master lensmaker Antony von Leeuwenhoek. Vermeer was a single painter; if he had stumbled across an innovative trick using lenses, he might have been able to keep it hidden. Hockney was forthrightly proposing that there had been centuries of conspiracy, that Western European painters had passed a secret from one generation to the next while never revealing it to the outside world; his book making the argument was called Secret Knowledge. It was enormously controversial to art historians; a conference on his claims (dubbed a "smackdown" by ArtKrush magazine) largely featured critics. But art historians weren't simply upset that they had missed the single most important fact about the Renaissance; in addition to the fact that Hockney's theory relied upon two hundred years of artists keeping a secret from the outside world, in the face of strongly-worded doubts about some of the internal evidence Hockney finds in the paintings he studied, a complete lack of documentary evidence (Why haven't any of these mirror apparatuses ever turned up? Leonardo da Vinci recorded his musings about the camera obscura; why wouldn't he have noted its use in painting in his secret notebooks? Why didn't any sitters -- or their highly-informed secretaries -- ever mention the use of mirrors in letters?) or even the scant physical evidence suggesting Vermeer's use of the camera obscura, Stanford professor David Stork noted that the convex mirrors didn't work. Mirror-making, like lens-making, simply wasn't advanced enough in the 1400s to provide the features Hockney claimed he saw in nearly every Renaissance master's work. Some of the oddities Hockney points to are compellingly weird; it seems likely that at least some painters used optical techniques more than we realized. But Hockney has become a conspiracy theorist, and at some point, most conspiracy theorists go beyond mere fact. They've seen the truth, and everything, even random noise or the absence of evidence, is another data point proving their claim. True believers don't have to think about the null hypothesis that there wasn't a two hundred year tradition of Dutch and Italian painters (painters, that close-mouthed and conspiracy-minded cabal!) using devices a hundred years too advanced for their time. He's shining a light into the darkness.

"I was talking with another historian the other day, and he assured me that no left-handed person would ever have been allowed to become pope in those days: the left was the devil's hand. Sinistra. But that's the effect you would get, in the early days of lens projection, if you hadn't yet learned to compensate for the reversal caused by the lens. For that matter, look through the rest of the book: Lorenzo Lotto's 'Man with a Golden Paw'; he, too, appears to be holding the object in his left hand. Doesn't it seem to you there are an inordinate number of left-handed people in this book?" He paused again before positively exulting, "I'm right. I'm right. I'm more certain of it every day."

posted at 10:32 PM

posted in ART & ALCHEMY, Old Master's Techniques - 7 replies

poised between the emerging world and the abyss

2007-05-30T15:32:50Z

from the static ocean of infinite possibilities
self organises patterns of resonance, perpetuating

patterns coalescing
through unfathomable time, natural selection strips

apart the shells, leaving tender creations leaping forth
creations like vast spires of improbability, rising

forth from the void

consciousness dances between coherence and chaos,

between form and nothingness, endlessly recycling,

cystalising
like Lord shiva, creation, perpetuation, destruction, rebirth

the artist poises between the brink of coherence and decoherence, fractaling between generation and negation, examining fistures of nothing, teasing apart obscurations of perception, and assumptions of cognition

tenuously shattering forth sparks of clear light

posted in ART & ALCHEMY, Old Master's Techniques - 0 replies