Art in Progress: The Empress of Ice Cream
From Blank Canvas to Finished Magik, Dragons Be Here
I don’t have a set process for my art. Sometimes a painting will be an in-the-moment capturing of desire, anger, hope, you name it. Other times, I see something in a flash-vision, or I glimpse an object or scene. Those images imprint in heart and mind, and I marinate them, letting them simmer in my psyche and sauté in my soul.
Some of my visions demand planning versus an off-the-cuff execution. Sometimes, I need to knead and prove my feelings, letting them rise into life.
The Journey with The Empress
The Empress of Ice Cream is one of those visions I lived with for a while, then lived through putting her on canvas. Showing you the process in glimpses doesn’t come near to capturing what I experience in making art—actually, the end product is the magik I want to spell your heart a few beats faster.
I normally don’t draw a cartoon to paint by, as I did here. Most all of my paintings are free-hand. But The Empress demanded I give her time and pauses, to see her transition from Otherworld into our world.
Findings
I build my art from what I call “findings”—cast-offs, scraps, objects you’d never expect them to be used. The canvas for Empress was sitting in the 4th-floor elevator lobby of my apartment building. Someone had moved and left it out for scavenging. Feeling no dumpster-diver shame, I snatched up this puppy. It had been washed in flat black paint. The back edges of the canvas revealed some greenish brush strokes of a painting effort that the leaver apparently blotted over. I’d never worked on a black canvas, but this was perfect for The Empress. Serendipity is art, and there are no coincidences. Only findings.
From Skeleton to Ice Cream Cone
My starting vision with Empress was of a girl, an ice cream cone, and a dragon—y’know, standard Norman-Rockwell fare. I saw a young woman conjuring a joyful confection. She started off in my vision as thin and willowy, then became positively skeletal. Maybe dead folks dream up ice cream.
The ice cream got bigger and bigger in my heart till out of the young woman’s chest, a dragon burst, winding around the cone.
I’ve learned to let visions be visions; to shut up and listen, feel, see, smell, touch what’s given. Don’t second-guess. Don’t question.
Sooooooo, I had a blank black canvas and a vision curling her finger to me. Time to puke up an ice cream cone!
But it wasn’t puking. I actually measured the ice cream cone dimensions, centering it on the canvas. For some reason, it had to come from the horizontal center and be centered vertically as a cone. I dunno. It felt right.
Tale of the Tape
Since I put precision into the sketch, I had to follow through, taping off the cone, so I could get sharp edges, and that wasn’t gonna happen free-hand.
With Mars Black and Ivory Black, I completely washed the canvas outside the tape and outlines of dragon, girl, and tombstone. Then I did fill-ins of the ground, the Empress’ dress, dragon, and ice-cream glob. For my purples/violets, I mixed a Metallic Purple with some Phthalo Blue, Ultramarine, and Magenta, differing the hues between dragon and maiden. For some parallelism, I dabbed highlights on the ground in the same color I washed the dragon, to make the light on the ground feel like it’s reflected off the würm’s scales.
Now I had a nice, sharp delineation of the space outside the cone and a rudimentary staging of the players in this drama. I had to keep to the straight and narrow by taping off the outside of the cone and painting it.
The tape meant I could do a red wash on the cone without messing with precision—at least in terms of crisp lines. Once I got the red into the cone, I got jiggy with it in other places. A dragon means fire. The light cast by dragon fire is ruddy and burnished, so I mixed red ochre, scarlet, and vermillion.
Tasting Color
I swear, when I get a mixture of colors right, it’s like I can taste them.
Painting is a technique for ensuring which constituent colors of the white light spectrum are absorbed by the canvas and which bounce back to the world. To paint is to discriminate, which requires all the senses.
With my experience of color come memories, scents, feelings, sounds, and tastes. I wanted viewers to taste and feel the reddened shell of a roasted crab because this dragon means to cook the world. The Empress is here to save her world—from and with her passion.
I wanted the cone to be tangible. The red backdrop meant I could do that because (see above) I have all these findings. Dontcha know I had some plastic mesh from a bag of oranges that Pam and I ate, oh, two years ago. Voilá!
Which led to …
… which begat …
Come Together—In Waves
Now I felt it coming together the way the loose strings of one of my novels finally make sense (vs. the scattered frenzy of riding a literary bull).
Untame the art by untaming yourself!
Suddenly, I felt waves, waves, waves. When I purpled in the dragon’s tail and fleshed out the wings, I wanted more curls. I added a heap of Metallic Black to my dragon purple on the palette and painted, um … space waves!
Now, what to do with the waves? Stippling! (Of course.)
The Empress deserved a purple-to-red-shift take on the Milky Way. And now I knew her name: Rebekah Nurse. Go Wikipedia it. You’ll see why.
The shapes, the flows, the forms, the sweeping feelings always guide me to the details. It was time to take this home, whatever home the Empress wanted.
Let be be finale of seem
The only Empress is the Empress of ice cream!