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.