Sketch for the first painting Death in Malaga

Where to start...

I got the commission. Not that I really feared being rejected, I know Bill (my patron) wanted to do this as much I do, but it was a shock that when he saw both of my sketches he decided that I needed to do both paintings. So I ended up landing both of them instead of just one. Do the happy dance! Okay, enough playing around...

So the work begins. This is the loose sketch for the first painting, Death in Malaga.

A bit about the painting. Towards the later half of the book, and of the war, Nell decides that if her and Edward are going to die that they might as well die together, so she starts walking with him to work. There was one particular day Edward described, where he was walking with Nell and the sky had otherwise been beautiful out, but you wouldn't know it when entering Malaga from all the smoke from the bombings. He then went on to describe how brutal and continuous the killings were. The Anarchist groups especially would round people up daily and shoot them and dump the bodies in mass graves, people would come around and cheer during the executions. Edward used to wear an American pin, and carry around a pipe, playing the role on an important American diplomat. The tactic saved his life more than once. This particular scene came to mind for the picture.

The good thing about having already done paintings like The Pale Cast of Thought and Faust, is that I've started to get a good method going for how to progress on this sort of thing. Here's what I'm considering right now:

Casting. Who plays what role. For the two main characters, Edward and Nell, all I'm looking for with a reference are people of the same height and build, the faces I'm taking from old photo's of the couple. For the characters in the background there's a lot less pressure, it doesn't have to be anyone specific in any particular pose, but I do have to decide male and female, and it helps to come up with motivations for the people doing the actions, so that it looks genuine.

Location. I've been walking around my neighborhood looking for alleys and streets that fit what I need, which is a street running up a slight elevation, Cobble stone is also important, Chicago common bricks and old stucco too. None of these are hard to find in the city. For the rest of it though, I'll have to pull from references on destruction and rubble and then start designing. The hardest part here is making parts look destroyed without making the clutter and rubble detract from the picture.

Costume. Who's wearing what and why? I've been doing a lot of research on clothing. This is a guilty pleasure for me. I don't like shopping, especially buying clothes, but for some reason figuring out what a character needs to be wearing makes me feel like Sherlock...if he were much less intelligent and painter...It's like getting into character. You have to put yourself into the mind and time of the people you're pretending to be. I think it's a lot of fun.

Time of day and source of light. In this instance I will be working in overcast light. In most cases tracking the light is important. This scene would be happening in the morning, so when it's overcast in the morning is when I'll be shooting my references. Normally I would figure out what direction they need to be facing, but its not needed here.

Color. What will the overall harmony of the painting be? When I'm doing something like this I like to collect paintings that remind of something I want to working towards. One thing I look to see is how artists of the past might have done something in a similar palette or affect that I want to learn from.

Since it came out, I've been using Pinterest to collect all my photo refs for inspiration on my paintings. I usually make the board private, but in this case I've decided to make this board public so that people can see my thought process.

So there are a few things I need to order for costumes and props, then all I need to do is take my reference shots. In order to do that I'll have to stage the scene. That's a post for another time...like when I figure it out.

The Little White Hearse. Some sketches and thoughts.

I just finished a painting entitled The Little White Hearse, a life sized picture which is about a mother reliving the pain of losing her child after seeing a white hearse drive by.

I completely lost track of time on how long this picture took because I had an apartment fire that destroyed nearly everything I owned. Tragedy tends to warp time. This painting was the last picture that I was able to pull out of the apartment, and it was still wet when that happened. There were some scrapes I had to repair, and I ended up repainting the entire top half of it because the dust and ash from the fire stuck to it. (No surprise considering there was dust and ash from the fire on the houses down the street from my apartment)

It sounds more daunting than it was in actual labor, the repairs went fast and I was back into actually working on the rest in no time. But I really don't think this painting took me all that long to do. The sketches were done almost a year before, here is the first sketch.

A lot of words, but really starting the sketch is opening up a dialogue with myself on the whats and the whys and the hows of the picture. Sometimes I get a flash of an image followed by its meaning, and sometimes I get a concept or idea or emotion that is then followed by a flash of an image.

In this case it was the concept first. I knew the feelings I wanted to convey, but it took a bit to flush out the picture. I started this sketch a year in advance so that I could occasionally look at it during down time with other projects.

This second sketch here was when I really started to answer some of the questions I posed for myself. Whenever I get stuck on something I stop and ask what the purpose of the picture is supposed to be. A lot of times this is all I need to edit and refine. I wanted to try and capture as much as possible with as little extra information as I could get away with. I probably tried for this because the last painting, Faust, was full of objects and detail. Life is most fun with some contrast in it.

I lost all of my process shots, they were on my last camera that seemed to just disintegrate into thin air, despite not being anywhere near the flames. But for this figure I drew in charcoal on the canvas until I reached my limit on pushing the drawing. Then I blocked it in with a grisaille so all I had to worry about was the drawing and the value.

I did this very thick and loose, and then scraped in the direction of the form after it had started to set up. Then I started in with the color. The background was mostly done in with a palette knife to give the feeling of an old plaster wall. My goal in my work is to make it feel like what its supposed to.

Spanish Civil War ramblings, and general complaining.

I've reached this point where I have so much to do, that figuring out where to start is making me delay.

Committing to one thing, automatically commits me to a slew of other things that must logically follow from the first commitment. And there's a list of them that all seem equally important.

Pricing paintings is so much harder for a commission, only really because of the fear of being rejected, which I imagine is much harder starting out than later down the road. I really want to do this painting though. Inspired from the book Death in Malaga, and then researching Robert Capa, a giant talent of a photographer who documented much of what was going on in Franco's territory.

The book Death in Malaga takes place from an American's point of view under the control of the Reds. His perspective is at no point as easy as their propaganda was romanticizing it to be. The moral of the story, whether you want to side with the Nationalists or Republicans on the political philosophy of how the people of Spain should have been governed there is the inescapable fact that atrocities were committed on both sides of this war, and from the atrocities the suffering looks to be about the same for all involved, either side, and eventually worse for the losers.

The human suffering is the point. When I look at Goya I don't care really, at least at first, who belongs to what ideology. I care about what my fellow humans are going through. If I'm to do this painting right I could go one of two ways, tell a direct scene take from the book, or try to capture the essence of the entire issue?

Both can work, I'm undecided. I have two completed sketches that will equally be worth telling, but I'm really leaning towards the sketch that aims to show the bigger picture...

So anyway, I need to get these sketches looked at by my patron so I can go from there 

Testing...is this thing on?

Yeah I haven't been around for a while, it's that stupid life thing always getting in the way. I'm revamping this bitch! I want to start using my blog to flush out ideas, and give insight into my work as I post it on my website.

I'm doing this because I'm about to start a number of more complicated pieces involving scenarios I'm not used to painting, as well as incorporating more figures than I've ever put on a canvas before. So in short...I'm scared as shit, and this will help me to work through my stages. That way I can suck a lot less by the time it's done. Knowing the process is essential for all work, and I'm only going to get good at telling a narrative with multiple figures, and in spaces that I'll have to invent but make look naturalistic, by actually going out and doing it.

Currently I'm mulling over two preliminary drawings for a commission I've gotten in illustrating a scene from the Spanish Civil War, taken from a book entitled Death in Malaga. I'm stressing over pricing and size, and of course there's always the fear that he won't like them, or had something else in mind. Who knows. I'll likely short myself on the price out of fear of not getting it because it's too awesome of a project not to get.