Ophelia / Boat Shoulders

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40" x 40" oil & ink on birch panel

Ophelia. Name derived from Greek οφελος (ophelos) meaning "help". Her name also belongs to Hamlet's lover who eventually went insane and drowned herself. However, the similarities end there; this Ophelia will not meet the same fate as Hamlet's lover. The sea dare not drown her, she's one who would drown the sea. She posed for me once. Phantom trade winds made her hair dance gently around her eyes, caressing the sails on the boats that rest delicately on her shoulders. The air cooled as it passed over her skin, carrying aromas of salt sweetened by the sea flowers that grow in her wake. Perhaps she would suffocate without these ghostly sea winds, without the salty air to sustain her. 
Then there are her eyes. Those two left eyes. Oh, how they hardly blinked, how one remained locked upon my gaze. Her delicate tattoos serve as a futile warning, if you can read them, you are already too close. 
She grew impatient and I could feel the unease in her, how the earth felt unstable beneath her feet. Some would call her a prisoner to the sea, though a wiser man would know the sea as her prisoner.   

As usual, I first primed the exposed wood with GAC 100, did about three coats this time. I prefer to paint directly on to the wood, as it makes blending colors easier, but having the outside portions primed makes it forgiving should any unwanted paint get on the wood (living with a kitten is sometimes dangerous). Detail was done in various colors of ink.

 Tattoos drawn with black watercolor pencil. 


Translated:

"Ad infinitum"(Latin) 

"to infinity without end"

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"y de que nadie oyera las canciones de navegantes que a veces cantaba bajo las estrellas"

"and that no one should hear the songs that sailors sometimes sang beneath the stars"

From Gabriel García Márquez's short story Un Señor Muy Viejo Cona Alas Enormes (An Old Man With Enourmous Wings) 
(Thanks to my lovely Morgita for her vast knowledge of romantic poetry)


 

above is the framed drawing of the original "Boat Shoulders". The blueprints for this piece. 
 

 

messy tubes of oil paint, little bottles of oil medium and a box of hooks, nails and screws.


Hope you like her, she'll be on exhibit in January for my solo show at Vessel. 
Prints coming soon.


xoxo
C

The Garden

The Garden - 21" x 24", oil, ink & watercolor pencil on Maple
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The last piece in the series of tattooed ladies. Although I seem to have become strangely addicted to the tattoos  so I don't think this series has ended. I suppose I would call this more of a phase than a series.

 I consider this piece to be the best work that I've ever done. This feeling is a little daunting though.  In a perfect world, I would think that each new piece should be better than the last, but instead I feel like I just get lucky. Since I did these three paintings relatively quickly, I have learned from each piece vital things that I have carried in to the next. My previous piece, Eternal Summer, I wasn't entirely satisfied with how the skin turned out, as I found it difficult to use the oils on top of the primer. For this piece, as an experiment I applied the GAC 100 everywhere but the skin portion: 

I love the way the raw wood soaks up the oils; it makes them dry much quicker that way. I also paint in very thin layers and use linseed oil, which also aids in a faster drying time. The quicker the oil dries, the quicker I get to draw the tattoos! 

As you may know, I am usually the model for my paintings. I find that this way I have the most control over the direction of the piece, and I also don't feel any weird pressure to make it look like anyone specific. I don't try and make my ladies look like me, though sometimes it's kind of inevitable. This time around, I wanted to make her face very different from the others, so I did. She's modeled after Lara Stone, whom I adore.

The butterfly tattoo in her early stages. That afternoon the sunlight joined me through the blinds and warmed my hands.


  

Anyway, I'm strange. I work really quickly and sometimes I think I need to slow down. If I spend more than two weeks on a piece I seem to lose inspiration and I wont work on it any longer. I'm a maniac and will paint nonstop if I have to, while the window of inspiration is still open. If I wait too long, my mind and heart wander to other ideas, other patterns, figures, shapes..
Oils and I have rekindled our romance and I think I'm going to continue this love affair. I have many projects that I do need to be working on, but I'm tempted to just glue myself to my easel and not resurface for a week. Alright, so not the best idea.

xo,
C

Eternal Summer

Behold! The tan-lined, tattooed, sleepy-eyed dame.

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And now it's time for round two of long and detailed process explanations.

But first, I must say how extremely excited I am for this show at Gallery Hijinks! It's right around the corner, the 21st of August. (As well as right around the corner from my house. Win.) Anyway, if you are in town and in the neighborhood, my tattooed ladies would love to see you.

Alright. So this time around I tried out some things differently. A lot of people have been asking me if I use a primer on the wood or some sort of gesso. I haven't in the past, but this time I did. The problem you run in to when choosing a primer is that it's generally white and very opaque. I like to leave the wood exposed around the figure, so a white gesso just wouldn't do. And it's terribly limiting to only apply it where you think paint is going to be. I'd feel very trapped if that were the case. Then this lovely lady reccomended a product to me, something to add a barrier between the woodgrain and the paint. Ladies and gentleman, I give you GAC 100! It's white in the bottle but dries perfectly clear! Now, I must say, it definitely did the trick in making the wood more vibrant and not so sponge-like. It also did make it much more forgiving if a drop of paint landed where it shouldn't have. (A little bit of mineral spirits picked it right up.)  Since it's like adding a thin coating of plasticy substance to the wood, the paint handles very differently. I found it a little more difficult to work the skin how I normally do, but it made doing the hair really easy as well as the halo. I personally prefer to paint directly on to the wood when rendering skin, but the hair was so easy to do on top of the primer, as it stopped the india ink from bleeding through the grain. So, for the next piece I'm doing, I applied the primer to everywhere but the skin portion. (More details on that later, but I definitely prefer doing it this way)
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Here she is at the start. I start filling in the pencil sketch with the basic pattern of light and shadows. From there I keep layering and layering until I'm satisfied.
 


Here I am drawing little houses. I know, weird, who paints in little dresses? I seriously do. Somehow I manage to get paint on everything but my clothes.. some strange skill I have acquired somewhere. I usually end up with bits of red or black paint on my face instead.
I also introduced a few new colors in to my palette which was fun, Rose Portrait and Mars Red (which is basically a Burnt Umber with some red hues).

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A sleeve of Victorian houses, my homage to San Francisco.

As stated in my previous post, the words say "thy eternal summer shall not fade", a snippet of Shakespeare's sonnet XVIII. This particular sonnet is so very special to me. In the 6th grade my grammar teacher taught this sonnet to us, we all had to memorize it and later recite it in front of the the class. I remember repeating it over and over for my mom, nervously trying to remember all the strange words. She would always tell me slow down, to speak it as if someone was writing it. I still have it memorized, as do my two best friends Lizzy and Morgan. It's this funny little connection we all have to eachother. I've always loved Mrs. Motgomery for making us memorize it, even if I didn't really understand it at the time. Now I find it to be so beautiful..

Here it is in full length:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
--

For the halo, I mixed gold paint and bleached linseed oil, it made it nice and glossy.

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As for the tattoo above, it's an outline of a world map, and a famous French quote that I adore.
"Il n'est rien de réel que le rêve et l'amour."

//

 "Nothing is real but dreams and love"

(which pretty much sums me up entirely)

Alright, I'm starting to get all sentimental and shit. So it's time to wrap this up.
 Once the piece is done and dry, I start the scan. My scanner bed is only 8.5" x 11", so it definitely takes a lot of scans to capture the whole image. Someday I'll invest in a larger scanner, but for now, this works. Here you can see the ridiculous amount of layers already, and that's only half the image. It's very tedious but definitely worth getting a high DPI image of it.

Also, the sound of my scanner drives my kitten nuts, it's a hilarious sight.

Think that's about it. Thanks for reading! As usual, I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. I am always experimenting and learning as I go, but I'm happy to share my discoveries with you.

xoxoxo
C

NAUTICA

She's all done, for the moment. Minor tweaking is inevitable.

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24" x 30" oil, watercolor pencil & ink on wood

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Here's a song for you to listen to while I go in to far too much detail about my painting process:

The Innocence Mission - Rain (Setting Out in the Leaf Boat)

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Finished her up yesterday. I'm a big fan of the size, it's a little larger than my normal oil paintings, but still manageable. I had a lot of fun playing with nautical elements, as that world fascinates me so much. The mermaid tattoo is inspired by art nouveau designs. The quote says "fair winds and following seas", which is a traditional mariner's phrase, it's like a farewell/blessing. It gives me chills a little bit.

Throughout the painting process I go through many emotional ups and downs. Mostly switching from "this isn't working, you've lost your touch, Charmaine" and "you know you'll get it eventually, just keep at it". Well, eventually it gets to a point that I'm comfortable with and I take it to the next step.

Here's a little bit about my painting process: the longest part for me is the conceptualizing. I spend a lot of time on the computer sketching in Photoshop, playing with colors and themes. Since I work from photo references I generally draw on top of the photos so I can change the hairstyles, clothing (or no clothing), etc. Once I feel good about the image I'll start sketching it on the wood. Even though my paintings are highly planned out, I leave a lot of room for changes and improvising.

After I'm happy with the pencil sketch, I start with the skin. I guess you could consider my technique more like "finger painting". I like to blend the colors together with my fingers, I find it's a much smoother result than using a brush. (My flesh color palette consists of Yellow Ochre, Alizarin Crimson, Burnt Umber, Titanium White and Ultramarine Blue.)

Once I am satisfied with the skin, I start the hair (my favorite part). I start by blocking in most of the color and shape with flat black oil paint. Once the black dries a bit, I bust out my India ink and draw in individual strands, just to give it more life.

The tattoos are predominately black watercolor pencil. I know, water and oil don't mix, but somehow the pencil works great on top of the oil paint (once it has dried a little bit). To get the color hues, I mix a lot of paint thinner with the oil so it's nice and transparent. I suppose some linseed oil would work too. If I feel like it needs more definition then I'll go in with my ink to get some darker lines. 

For the blue halo, I was in a bit of a predicament. I felt like it really needed it and I wasn't going to be happy if it wasn't there, but it's difficult to get a smooth and even color when painting with thinned-down paint directly on the wood, as it soaks in so quickly. Then I found an old bottle of Bleached Linseed Oil buried in the depths of my art drawers. It adds a nice gloss and transparency to the oil, which made it really easy to use directly on the wood. It's also thin enough where I could paint directly on top of the hair to get the blue behind it.

Anyway. Yeah. It works wonders. I wish I had used it for the skin! I'm going to experiment with it on my next painting that I'm starting tomorrow. Yes, more tattooed ladies coming up!

Well, thanks for looking, hope you like her.

xo

C