Fresh Start

Ahh, a blank canvas, a clean glass palette, and a tidy taboret -- all I need now is coffee . . . 

. . . and some preparatory sketches.  Oh, there they are!

Before starting to put paint on canvas, I find it helpful to do some drawing to better understand what I want to see in the finished painting.  For me, more than any other medium, drawing with graphite is a way of knowing.  If I can draw it, then I can understand it.  The painting I am currently working on includes a crater.  For inspiration, I looked through images posted on NASA's website of the surface of Mars.  There I found a beautiful panorama of the "Santa Maria" crater assembled from photographs taken by the rover Opportunity in December 2010.  

Using the panorama image as a guide, I made a drawing on three feet by five feet tracing paper to define the overall shape of my crater.  Next I built a small model using a shallow plastic container, cardboard, aluminum foil, and spray paint.  I sculpted the contours of the rim of the aluminum foil crater to match the contours of the large drawing.  Finally, I made several small graphite drawings of the aluminum foil model, lit by the studio lamp on my drafting table, in order to better understand how shadows fall across the crater.

This process helps me see the connections between three-dimensional form and the two-dimensional world used to represent it.  It also helps me understand the basic structure of forms in three-dimensional space (I should say four-dimensional space-time!) so that I understand how to create my own worlds in two-dimensions.