Evolution of a painting

Once upon a time, this was a nice, solidly composed painting of musicians playing

instruments.

It cribbed from Baroque paintings of musicians, playing with the eyelines of characters and forming fairly classical diagonals. It was pretty straight forward.

Then I decided it needed to grow, physically. I had an extra strip of board attached to the top. Now I had more room to play, to make things strange and interesting. Now I had to problem-solve.

So for a while this painting looked terrible. I mean seriously terrible. I crammed a few extra characters in, in an arbitrary way, trying to make things interesting. I inexplicably painted the background with daubs of light blue and green. I was experimenting, to say the least.

Then I made my self-portrait for class, which I discuss in the last blog post. I was so satisfied with my mirror technique. I felt that the reflections really communicated something about looking back on the past, being a spectator, questioning what was reality. I felt like this was all really relevant to my grant project.

So I started to fix my painting. I adjusted the scale of the newly added flute player. I located my characters in a space that functioned as both a stage and a house of mirrors. I looked to my reference images-- both photos and Baroque paintings-- to resolve the background. And I kept thinking about reflections. Then I found another reference source, one that I hadn't as yet been taking too seriously. I looked back at sketches of these musicians that I'd done years ago at the Faire, and found an image of the harper on the right, from a completely different angle.

Now, I had planned this painting would feature some musicians who were just murals painted on the stage, and some who were “real people”. I planned that the harper would be a kind of 50/50 character, an ambiguous figure who could be either a painting or a real person, depending on how you look. When I found this sketch, I thought I could add to the ambiguity by creating a sort of pseudo-reflection of him-- not quite at the right angle, not quite wearing the same clothes, but the same man. With the back of my paintbrush I carved a quick sketch.

I wasn't too happy with the placement of the sketched figure, but I liked the idea. I began to work it out, and this is where the painting is now.



Beautiful? Not yet. Better? Oh my goodness yes. I was really happy with the little brown underpainting. It was pretty, and pretty can be hard to touch. But right now I like it more than ever. I'm glad I took the risk and messed up this piece for a while. It has so much more potential now.

Oh, and just for fun, since I'm playing with mirrors

My youngest sister called this the Infinity Renaissance Last Supper.