BFA Thesis show

Here's some of the in-process paintings and "finished" product from my BFA Thesis show this May and my artist statement. I liked using bright colors!

Using oil paint I strive to emulate movement through lines, shapes and color. I try to create a balance between the solid and the line that gives way to a sense of motion. The initial under drawing always seems to capture a moment of freedom and looseness so I try to hold on to the gesture throughout the creation. I capture many instances of time as a multiple exposure effect. To give a sense of history I cover marks up and put them back in until time is evoked. My paintings express the vitality of each individual.  This is a celebration of life that I hope shines through my work showing a deeper need and desire to celebrate each moment in each life. Picking colors and motions that I think reflect the subject’s personality I try to establish an identity that is both individual and universally recognizable.

Last Week of Restoration Lab

The last week of class was a scramble since we had a lot of activities to squeeze into a short amount of time.

We first learned how to back a cracked canvas with a newer canvas. This painting originally had an old mend which was first taken off. Then we used brushes to remove any dust or dirt that would effect the process of lining the painting. This can be really stressful and frantic because you need to quickly line the old canvas without any ripples and wrinkles so the type of glue won't set in the wrong place.

 

We also finished taking our frescoes off the plaster from my last post.  It's a little complicated to explain but here it goes:  A canvas is first applied to the wall or in this case a plaster block that has a fresco on it and glue is swiped over the top of it. After that dries for a day the canvas is peeled off the plaster as shown below. Sometime plaster is still stuck to the canvas so to get as much of it off the canvas as possible it is gently pounded with a mallet or scraper. Then another canvas is attached on top of the canvas you scraped the plaster off, thus sandwiching the fresco in-between the two canvases. We waited another day for that to dry.  The cloth in front was then moistened with water to remove it. The finished product basically looks like an oil on canvas painting.

My classmates are slowly peeling away the canvas from the plaster and then scraping the left over plaster off.

Here's my sibyl freed from the plaster!

On one of the last days we went to an actual site and worked on restoring frescoes on walls. I think the house was used for many ceremonies, especially weddings. It was good experience to work at an actual site. If you think the arched, small space below looks confining imagine conservator's working on Vasari's frescoes inside the Duomo. It makes my neck hurt just thinking about it!

Also it depends on how busy I start to get, but I'll try to post some of the field trips we went on with Lorenzo . He had many connections from all the buildings and objects he restored for clients so we got a lot of exclusive tours and see some rarely shown art.

Gesso and Frescoes

Once we got back from Calabria (which was Amazing!) We learned how to mix a gesso and apply it to a big painting that had been worked on by several restoration classes called Santa Caterina. I don't completely remember everything in this lesson and unfortunately my notes weren't very thorough for this section, so my explanation might be a little unclear.

As I understood it, the gesso is made of either rabbit bone or fish bone. It's mixed as 1:10 ratio. Since we were using organic material, using too much bone can make the paste moldy so it's important to get the right ratio.  We made a 1 part organic bone mixture with 10 parts cold water in a small can, which then went into a bigger can to boil and melt the bone into a sticky glue.  We then sifted a powdered material (maybe made of chalk and talcum, a kind of powdered gesso) into the rabbit glue.  The mixture has to be the perfect viscosity. Not too fluid and not too thick, somewhere in-between where it drips at a steady rate as a bead. We then applied this to the painting where the painting had corroded. When applying we had to make sure it didn't touch the existing oil paint or it could warp the painting that was already there. After the gesso dried we scraped it down so it would be even with the original painting and applied watercolor to match the original colors.

If you notice the bottom two pictures, there is gesso filled in to the left of the face and on the forehead in the left picture. In the right picture, I'm slowly building up the color with watercolor to get a similar color tone to the surrounding area. 

We also started painting a fresco in preparation for peeling it off the plaster and transferring it to canvas. This is one of the methods that can be used to preserve frescoes. The plaster was made with sand and non-acidic lime. The sand has to be from a lake or river because sea salt destroys the color of a painting. The lime is also boiled in water until in becomes alkaline (meaning not acidic). They use lime because it pushes the color of pigment forward and creates a transparency. The best ratio for plaster is 1 parts lime: 2 parts sand. If there is too much lime the plaster will crack easily. If there is much sand it becomes too porous. 

We then painted on the dried plaster with colored pigments mixed with water. This would probably be called fresco-secco as the paint was applied to dry plaster. A lot of old master works were painted buon fresco, which means the paint was applied to wet plaster. The artist would plaster and paint in sections daily, or a days work called giornata. But before the painting could be done, a sketch is first outlined on the plaster, usually with a red pigment called sinopia. 

We outlined our sketch by using a piece of paper with holes pricked in it. A bag of pigment, spolvero, was pounded over the paper, producing pigment on the plaster where the holes had been. I decided to paint a copy of Michelangelo's Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel. I wish I had a little more time to finish  my painting but the since of urgency and time constraint definitely opened my eyes to how hard it would be to complete a wall fresco.

Restoration in Calabria

The second week of class we went to Calabria. We visited several orchards, drank limoncello and ate a lot! The food was delicious! We mainly stayed in the small town of Rocca Imperiale where we cleaned and restored some 18th century furniture and an alter in a church.

 There were four pieces of furniture. One big chest for daily cloths like sheets, one medium chest which would have been used for a woman's fancy or important occasion clothes, one small chest for a baby's belongings, and a small table probably used for writing. They were all found in the basement of an 15th century castle. (I will describe the castle in more detail in another blog post.)

All the furniture was covered in dust inches thick. So we took most of the first day washing off the dust with water and brushes. After the cleaning was finished we took off some of the varnish with cotton soaked with ammonia, vinegar and water mixture. The small table had also been painted with a tacky blue color that hadn't been part of the table when it was originally made, so we scraped of the blue paint. After cleaning and removing the varnish we coated in a preserving and natural finish that made the furniture really shine.

While in Calabria, Lorenzo showed us past restoration projects. We visited many churches and sites in which he had previously worked. This was a polychrome sculpture. Much like a painting on wood, a polychrome can have many issues. They often need a lot of surface cleaning and consolidation of paint. Some polychromes can have issues of bugs eating the wood, so losses are usually filled.  There also can be a problem of combating past restorations of polychromes. They were sometimes repainted incorrectly or stripped of it's paint to reveal bare wood.

At the church in Nocara, which was a town high up in the mountains, we mainly just painted the wall and steps around the alter of St. Roch with a tan color and sponged over that to give it a type of texture. But my favorite part was applying gold leaf to metal that had been oxidized or a patina that had formed on the metal. It was a very delicate procedure. You first applied a type of natural glue and then you pressed the thin gold leaf on to it gently. You could't be too finicky with it because once it was on there it was stuck.