As I am still in the thick of working on my masters at Savannah College of Art and Design, it has been over a year since I last posted on this blog. But one the final assignments for the current course, Painting Studio II, is to post the final work for the term to a virtual gallery. So I am “resurrecting” the site temporarily to fulfill my assignment here. Once I am done this summer, I plan to resume many of the things I have had to set aside and perhaps this will be one of them.
For now I’ll be glad if I can remember how to navigate this site.
The Liturgy of the Hours Original Pastel Drawings 3.5" x 5" each, pastel on Wallis paper
This little series of drawings was done nearly 2 years back when I started the journey at SCAD. I decided to use it as the jumping off point for a body of work in the present course. What resulted was a concentration on just two of the eight, which were Lauds and Vigils. Lauds is the early morning hour near dawn and Vigils, also known as Matins or Nocturnes is in the middle of the night. In a sort of meditation, I worked and sometimes re-worked the same subject over on different scales and in different media.
The Liturgy of the Hours: Lauds original drawing, 3.5" x 5" pastel
Starting with the small original of Lauds, I began with the intention of translating all 8 to a larger scale as oils on canvas. The first works were attempts to recreate the drawings as 24″ x 36″ oils on canvas. On the right below, is the first Lauds, though it was subsequently re-worked again further on in the term.
The Liturgy of the Hours: Lauds (24" x 36" oil painting)
Next I went back to my preferred medium of pastel and executed an 18″ x 24″ painting on a piece of Wallis board (Wallis sanded paper mounted to foamcore). I found it interesting to go down in scale and back to a more familiar medium. The techniques and style however are quite a stretch from what I usually do being more simplified and abstract with less mark making and texture. The use of strong contour lines to define areas was also a challenge for me. I felt very much like I was fighting with myself a great deal of the time with this project!
Lauds, pastel painting, 18" x 24"
Originally I worked on both the Lauds and Vigils canvases concurrently. Then as I began to work on and concentrate on one piece at a time, I began to think of them as presented in a more linear fashion. So after all of these different versions of Lauds we move to nightfall as it were and present the largest and most recent piece in the series.
The Liturgy of the Hours:Vigils ,Oil on birch panel, 3 ft. x 4 ft.
Moving backwards from the largest, is the pastel painting of the same which had been done just previous to this panel and then the re-worked orginal 24″ x 36″ oil on canvas version.
The Liturgy of the Hours: Vigils, pastel painting on Wallis board
The Liturgy of the Hours: Vigils, Original oil on canvas, re-worked
Last in line is the small pastel drawing that was the genesis of all these others.
The Liturgy of the Hours: Vigils, pastel on Wallis paper, 3.5" x 5"
All the different versions have a common thread running through them but the variations of scale and the change of media yielded a great many different results. While the success of each is certainly able to be debated and analyzed, the experience was worthwhile. There were tremendous growing pains associated with the project but there does seem to have been tremendous growth and self-knowledge commensurate with it.
As I developed the work in the late half of the term, I returned to working on wood panel with oil which I had done the past two summers. I also turned to the use of the tondo presentation once more which I had enjoyed experimenting with last July in Savannah for what I considered to be one of my most successful pieces.
From those experiences, I decided to further crop these two views within a circle and frame them inside a square of painted gold. I called them simply the Day and Night tondi.
Day Tondo: Lauds, oil on panel, 2 ft. x 2 ft.
Night Tondo: Vigils, oil on panel, 2 ft. x 2 ft.
From here I am in the beginning stages of a larger series of panels such as these, perhaps on the theme of the Stations of the Cross. My thought is to somehow through cropping and abstracting to transcend landscapes of devastated areas of the world into object of reverence and beauty.
Bernadette,
What a great website! The text along with the works is very helpful and the whole site is laid out in an easy to understand fashion!
You photographs look wonderful on here as well, the colors are so intense…I am truly impressed!