THE GRID PROJECT - PART THREE : Translating into Paint

"Gate", 18.5” x 34”, photograph, archival inkjet print, ©Leslie Parke 2018

Poured background

From the start, I knew that I wanted to make paintings from the broken television "grid" photographs, but they posed a lot of technical difficulties. To begin with,  I paint in oils. Making a clean stripe in oil is more difficult than with acrylic paint. With acrylics you can mask out your stripes with tape and then seal it with a clear acrylic layer, then add your color and it won't bleed. That pretty much insures that you will have a sharp edge.

It was the atmospheric look of the background that most held my interest in the photographs. How to achieve that? I thought a spray gun might work, but having once tried to spray paint chair in my living room, I know that the paint, suspended on air goes everywhere. In very short order I could destroy all the work in my studio, as well as, stacks of paper, rolls of canvas and other materials. I would need a spray booth.

A person in my building, Keith Davitt from Thirsty Cat Fountains, suggested a spray painter that achieved its effect through vibration. He used it to glaze his fountains. It was much less likely to permeate the air in the studio. I still haven't settled on a solution, but I am leaning toward an airbrush, like a spray gun, but much more refined and allegedly easier to control.

I wasn't going to let a need for new equipment stop me. I thought of other ways I might achieve a similar effect. Rothko mixed pigment with rabbit skin glue in an effort to achieve both depth and luminescence. (The glue is what artist's used to size their canvases. First layer was usually the glue by itself, followed by pigmented glue called gesso.) Agnes Martin worked with very thin acrylic paint. I thought of all the ways I might get the atmospheric background. Spray painting was one way, glazing (using thin layers of transparent pigments suspended in medium), coloring rabbit skin glue, all seemed possible. But as I was set up to do some pouring in my studio I thought I would try that first.

Once I poured in the background I started adding large areas of color.I knew that I don't really have the personality to make absolutely perfect stripes. With oil paint I was anticipating that some of the color would seep under the tape. Like Barnett Newman, I was going to live with it.

You wouldn't think choosing the right tape to make your stripes would be that great of an issue, but it turned out to be. There is the issue of the stickiness of the tape. Will it pull off the painted surface below it? Will it block out the layers of paint over it?  Will it stick to the canvas and not pull off at all? And then there was the issue of the width of the tape. You can usually find half inch tape at the hardware store, but any smaller than that you need to scour the internet. 

The main issue for me was to get the tape to stick. While I followed the photograph in a general way, I was not entirely sticking to the color scheme. I wanted a little more vibrant color in the final piece. What followed next was not what I expected.

I would lay in the colors and then see that this passage was working, but that one wasn't. I felt as though it was like playing music. Passages would work, but then how did it work with the whole piece. And other parts were just plain wrong, but why? The painting was tutoring me in what it needed.

Here is what it needed: the "ground" needed to be organic, the poured surface relating the the quality of the atmosphere in the original photograph, as well as, being a signifier that this was made by hand and not machine. Colors next to each other had to work together, but there were also passages across the surface of the whole painting that needed to work together. Unlike the "flat surface" that painting has been emulating since the beginning of the last century, this painting sat not on the surface of the canvas, but in space.

For the whole painting to work, certain stripes cleaved to an imaginary plane, while other moved in and out of that plane. Here are some of the versions it went through. I hadn't expected the process to be so specific. That is, only certain colors of certain values and certain intensities worked in certain places. Change one, you had to change many of the other ones until it all worked together again.

Here is the final version: You may notice that the original photograph also had horizontal stripes. This canvas was not the right proportion to add those stripes, but there was also the consideration that if I attempted to add them and failed I would have ruined weeks of work. I am now in search of a way to also incorporate those stripes.

"Gate", 40” x 72”, oil on canvas, ©Leslie Parke 2018