Glamour

                  The fantasy about worlds other than your own is a lot better than living it from within. The romance of a bohemian painter like me is something to dream about in front of a warm fireplace while sipping a Margeaux wine. But living it is a different story. Let me live it for you. I will keep the romance alive and tell you about fame and fortune and how rotten daily struggle can get.

                       It is hot and humid in Miami, really hot. Of course we planned to do the job in wintertime but the project is slightly behind. Every day there is construction going on with loud noises, slamming doors, men yelling and  lots of dust. Marble dust, dry wall dust, any dust. I was lucky to have a bathroom when I arrived at the Alumni-building of the University of Miami but most of the time the only option is a port-o-potty in the back yard.  It slants over to one side and the fumes in the heat makes the stink unbearable. Sitting there doing my business I often think thoughts of my girl friends who are having their nails done in fragrant rooms. 

                      The paint gets everywhere, on the walls but also on me and I do my job in filthy looking paint clothes bought in a goodwill store. I wear no make-up and my hair, which gets full of drywall dust anyway, does not look like a million bucks. To be brief, I look pretty bad when I am working and I could not care less because I care about the my work.                     

                        Not in the case of UM, but very often jobs in construction are not done by highly educated sophisticated gentlemen. In a job in Port Charlotte our crew consisted of a piece of dough just released from rehab, a drunk with a bloody black and blue eye, a starving musician, and a weathered foreman who could curse like a sailor. Aviva and I were the only women on the job and we both revealed an accent while speaking. During one of the lunch breaks the DUI-offender asked us if we had work permits. It made me think that people in glass houses should not throw stones. And yes, we both had green cards.                    

                         The major part of any job is like a nine to five routine. Every day I show up for work, like a farmer going to his land. I feel poor because the deposit has run out, and for days on end I can only afford minimum food and drinks. Sometimes I fuel up with quarters left over from better times. It sounds silly but for most hard workers that is reality. It still is the people behind the desks who are able to count their money, craftsmen wages are gone before the job ends. The longer it goes on, the harder it is to live without pay.

                          One day I was painting a mural in a court yard. It was outside and there was no escaping the heat. Worn out by the physical endurance of climbing scaffolds, painting, and concentrating for hours on end in an August hellish heat, the owner came by to admire the work. Politely making room for him in the dirt, I moved the tall ladder out of the way. On top stood a pan with blue paint which I had forgotten. The motion made the pan tip and from 14 feet high it fell down. It fell on my head while I was talking to John, blue streaks of paint running through my hair and in my neck.

                  His dry remark was, “I guess it’s not such a glamorous job after all.” I wondered why he even could think of painting being a glamorous job. The only moment of real glamour is when the work is done and ready to show off.  It is one brief moment which is mostly shared with totally different people than the ones on the job site. I am a Chameleon, going from rags to riches in a heart beat. Out come the Neiman Marcus outfits, nail polish and high heels. I sure look very different and often somebody asks me “Now, who did the actual job?”

The Pines

Oil Painting on Gator Board

Study of Native Pine Trees –Coral Gables, Florida

I did not realize the power of a Pine until this morning when I watched them up close. I was not happy with the way the pines looked in the mural. I could not put a finger on it so I decided to head out to study some of the Pines that are still standing. Like most of really interesting things it is the “negative space” that makes them special. Only by studying an object can I view the space around it. The object, size, proportion and texture are defined by the surroundings. The shape of the space between the leaves and the trunk defines the tree itself. Seeing them both at the same time and seeing them as the plain shape is the truth of learning to see. And that is the secret of learning to draw and paint.

At seven this morning I learned about the truth of the Pines. They are definitely defined by their openness. This makes the tree  not merely a thing but more a statement of free air. This was wrong with what I already had painted on the wall. The Pines on the wall were dense and thick with needles. Nice colors, good shape, but no space between them.

Why would I go through all the trouble of waking up early, putting bug spray all over my body (the mosquitoes bite even through my clothes), get coffee to go and plant myself under a tree to paint? I mean, I could have taken a photograph last night, take the memory card to Walgreens and bring the picture home. I would have been able to study the exact same shape of the tree  in bed with a cup of coffee on the night stand. No.

Painting outside is an act of faith. Being exposed to the elements means you are a part of them. Being surrounded by the life-force itself means I am taking in that energy. Trees have energy and so does the wind. My picture will soak up that energy. The more difficult the circumstances have been in the past the better my paintings have become. That is just an observation. It feels like the more I surrender to nature and let God do its work, the more spontaneous and vivid my paintings become. I feel there is another factor at play when I paint outdoors. I feel connected, I feel I have a purpose in life and I feel thankful to be part of the bigger picture.

My mood changes for the better even when the circumstances are really hard like last week in temperatures of 105 degrees, or at the other extreme when even the coffee froze on the rim of my cup in -30 degrees last winter. This is my purpose in life; “To make God’s world visible for all the people in the fast cars who are driving by and can only allow themselves to watch the other cars and traffic lights.” Most people don’t notice the morning glow on the trunks of the patient Pines. They bring memory cards loaded to 250 pictures to Walgreens and look at two dimensional photos of their vacations. Being disappointed to see what they thought was beautiful but are now surprised -wondering why the pictures look so dull.

I will tell you why. You are missing the third dimension. I as an artist (any artist will do) am able to add the suggestion of this dimension to the painting, adding my soul, the plants soul en the negative space that surrounds it, The Universe so to say. This is truly magic. There is no magic to a photograph (unless an artist has put his vision unto it). The object/subject might be the same, the value is not.

Now you know that negative spaces have nothing to do with negativity. On the contrary. It is the space that defines the subject. It is the pauses in a song that makes the words stand out, it is the break in a poem, its the lines of white between the written word… it’s all that is said without saying it loud. It’s the lack of anything that makes something into a thing. This is the no-thing. As a philosophical statement I would add to it that God exists in the big and small Nothing. It is available for everybody. Just become quiet and you will feel it.

Pollution

                   As I was cleaning up my tools and a table full of paint stuff, I was thinking about what this does to the environment and what would be the least polluting way to approach my job. Nowadays they have “low VOC” paints, which means they don’t evaporate such bad fumes. They are also all water-based. I am questioning what kind of damage they do to the environment, and I am not expecting honest answers from the industry. I am expecting the truth from my own eyes and experiences without bias. The reason why I cannot trust the industry is because the owners of a paint company can only talk for themselves with their own interests in mind.

                  Selling the “Green Concept” has been great for all sorts of products and is not necessary great for plants, animals and water. (And therefore not for us ordinary people who have no shares in the company’s profits)It is not true that if we buy more paint the fish are going to flourish;  it’s actually quite the contrary. The buckets which carry the paint are made of thick plastic. I would guess that it would take 120 years before something like that would deteriorate. Think about it, having a whole building painted probably takes 80 buckets. Do you know how many new buildings are erected each day that need to be painted?

                 The super low VOC paint that goes in it is of a high quality and does not smell. Just rinse out rollers and brushes with water and everybody is happy. But the paint still has solvents and material that is not food for the fish. I once witnessed a so-called painter who could not care less for anything except his pay check, throw half a bucket of paint on a thick roller down the drain. Where does that go? Professional painters know that left over paint should be dried out and than discarded. Even rinsing brushes takes a lot of clean water.  Usually I do not rinse rollers at all but just throw them away when the job is done.

                   Is oil paint all that bad? I have hardly any left -overs from oil paint. I rinse my brushes and pour the dirty juice into a clear bottle. The sediment goes to the bottom and the top will be re-used. )This is after I have cleaned my brushes with a paper towel and some Vaseline.) The vapors might be bad but if you are conscious about handling the solvent and keep lids on jars,  it does not do anything bad for the fish. There is also hardly any left over from the paint itself because it does not dry fast on the palette so you can use it days on end.                              

                   Yesterday I had thick layers of dried acrylic paint on the edges of the jars. Most of it I could peel off and throw in a garbage bag, but the rest? Does a Snapper thinks he eats a small fish when he sees a sliver of blue paint moving around in the water? Is this the reason why we all get cancer sooner or later? Which we then need to treat with even more poisonous stuff that goes also in the water through the dump and rain. Is there somebody out there who is able to see the overall picture of our behavior and can give an honest answer without the interest of some company in mind? Should there not be an animal rights activist who stands up for the ecosystem as a whole? We cannot get our information through marketing sales people. By the way, is there some one out there who really cares?

O’Keeffe

It is important to have your own voice as an artist. That means that the paintings I make are definitely mine without doubt. Style comes automatically after mastering the basic knowledge of shape and color. It took me a very long time to master my craft because I am a perfectionist and I do not have a formal education in painting and drawing. Making a living came first and somehow I had to find extra time to teach myself to paint. It never came to a development of style.

                     During the thirty years that I have built my life as an artist, I have not always been painting. I did not want to be influenced by other artists before I was ready, in protection of my authenticity. I wanted to introduce other artists into my life as they would come naturally by meeting them, talking to them, learning profoundly about what they had to say and why they would enter my space at that particular time in my career.

                    I was not even planning to go visit my friends in Colorado but somehow this seemed to be the only time in our life that all the odds were right for a couple of days in the fresh air of the mountains. I was happy that my friend took the trouble to pick me up in Albuquerque. As we drove off north he told me he would treat me to the tourist route to their cabin. We skimmed Santa Fe and took a left turn in Espanola. I could not see much of the famous enchantment everybody was raving about. It all looked rather poor and dry to me. I did like the softness of the adobe houses, a style that was even continued in the big casinos and blended beautifully with nature. After an hour we had left civilization far behind us and it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere. Now and than a car passed us, sometimes we drove in a little convoy behind a slow pick-up truck.

                   Late in the afternoon an impressive rock formation lit up red and orange in a pronounced shape. It took me completely by surprise and the feeling of such landscape was overwhelming. As I am constantly looking for places to paint, places to set up camp for a while and make a series of landscape paintings, I thought this was a unique kind of setting. The rocks would change dramatically as the sun went down and reveal an everlasting transformation of shapes and colors. A painter at heart could not feel bored being there. We passed a ranch, named Ghost Ranch. It was a place that I could see myself take a room and board for a couple of months when my host said, I think that is where Georgia O’Keeffe used to hang out.

                    This intrigued me because I thought places of famous painters would be destroyed by tourism, new buildings, hotels and summer camps. Her name was connected with Taos and Santa Fe but not the desert. The Ghost Ranch looked well maintained but extremely modest and almost invisible from the road. Georgia O’Keeffe herself missed it the first time she set out to find it. I was ignorant of its existence but found it nevertheless. The discovery was not a big deal for my host who was tired of hearing about the fame of Georgia O’Keeffe connected to the area. Any body who can pick up a brush can paint flowers as she did. She is famous for her flowers and not her rock paintings. Many amateurs copy her work and proudly present it as being their own. Even the artist’s sister copied her, had successful shows and trashed a good relationship for years. I never was impressed with her art as I struggled to get my own world in perspective and not hers.

                        The next day my friend and I drove back to the same place to get acquainted with the glimpse of something special that was deeply felt the night before. Normally there is hardly anything inspiring about a dead artist’s workplace. It simply consists of four walls and some windows. Art is born in the dark and no working method or place can reveal its mystery. This was different. Georgia O’Keeffe’s studio was the desert with the rock formations at the end of it, unchanged through the years and still inspiring. A hot dry wind blew through the adobe buildings, a courtyard, a museum of natural history and moved leaves of some sparse trees. A certain immense silence hung over us as if we were in a Cathedral.

                     With the book “Full Bloom”, a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe, I met a new friend. With her a new world opened as the world of a fellow traveler in a still hostile environment. Although many biographies contain too many boring facts, too many names of people, I could read between the lines and discovered similarities in our struggle, joy and sense of privilege that comes with living the life of a professional painter.

Mind Over Matter

                Anyone who has ever learned something really difficult will understand what I am talking about. I mastered the act of rowing in a single handed skiff . This is a row boat a couple of inches wider than a regular human body but 2 or 3 times their height in length. The combination of oars flat on the water together with the length of the boat forms a strong balance in which you cannot flip the boat and fall into the water. When it accumulates speed, it is easy to balance your body and slide the seat in order to plunge the oars into the water; much like riding a bicycle. But you need to lift the oars to gain speed, so for a fraction of a second you will have no speed and no balance through the oars. I learned to row a skiff and I can still remember the feeling of victory that went through my mind when I could hear the rumbling of the water like pebbles against the stern on an early morning on Indian Creek.

Learning to draw and paint is equally difficult. It is finding the balance between eye focus, hand coordination, and the brain. The brain wants to tell you tricks all the time how you are wasting your time, how you cannot do it and other nasty thoughts that will prevent you from making a good well liked drawing of something. Being stronger than the  brain and listening carefully to the messages, will enable you to get a strong balance between eye, hand and brain. It takes 10,000 hours to become really good at something. That means 28 years drawing one hour every day, or in office terms, 8 hours a day 5 days a week for 5 years with some vacation. 

                “This is do-able.” I told myself when I began painting professionally.  I would pride myself in being able to stand still for hours at a time being bitten by musquitos and burned by the sun in order to get a good painting. I forgot about the 10,000 hours, a pay check or even the quest to become good at something. Painting and drawing became my life. I was emotionally and spiritually involved in the whole thing as I became more and more intrigued by the endless challenges and possibilities.

             Then one day my body did not want to play any more and my right arm acted up painfully. I ignored it first, than got some advice from fellow painters, took ibuprofen and hot baths and rested my arm. I was in the middle of a large series of paintings that I felt were my best work ever, and I truly could not stop. Ignoring my mind had been good for teaching myself to paint, but this time I had to listen but it took me some time to undo the ignoring.

               I went to the doctor because I thought if he also had 10,000 hours of excellence he should be able to help me really understand what was going on. I had to spend a whole morning to meet this specialist. I had to find the hospital, park my car, walk to different places to find where his office was located, fill in all sorts of forms and wait. The doctor was a friendly guy who took five minutes of his precious time to examine my arm and to talk to me. There was nothing to see on the outside. My arm looked strong and suntanned, healthy as could be. I had to describe my complaints. “When you pass fifty years of age a lot of people have to deal with this kind of inflammation. It’s called a tennis arm. You just have to deal with it. Go to CVS, buy a brace, take ibuprofen and if it does not get better come back” “But I have a mural to paint” “Come back and I will inject you with cortisone” “I don’t like cortisone” “Your choice. I can also operate”. “Thank you doctor”

                        Driving back to my studio I thought this was a lousy visit. If doctors are mad because patients go to the internet to figure out themselves what they need, they should look a little bit closer to what they really mean to the patient. I got really mad when a bill for 250 dollars was sent to my house. So many people are on their own for dealing with health issues that I cannot even imagine the army of folks who keep taking this kind of abuse so the system keeps surviving. I was not taking it.

                I had to tap in to my own wisdom to deal with this issue just like we use to do living on a small Caribbean Island where help, any help was far away. I meditated to reach the core of the problem. It came down to the fact that my body was growing out of balance. My right side was over used out of habit. Posture and attitude in my mother language has the same word (houding) I had to change my attitude towards my posture in order to recreate balance. I could not find anything else to correct this other than my mind would simply have to work with my left arm to learn to paint too.

              “This was going to be really hard” I thought, but much to my surprise I noticed that my left arm loved to be part of the game. For the big heavy areas it’s my left arm that does all the work while my right lingers leisurely on my back.(I do that on purpose because the domineering side is too eager to take over) For the fine tuning the right can have his own moment to shine. My body feels more balanced and the pain is very manageable. I don’t even take ibuprofen or hot baths.

               I would like to talk to the doctor again and ask him how would he feel if he bought an original painting from me and then got a cheap reproduction for the same price. His job could be so much more interesting and fascinating, if we would have looked together at the holistic part of pain, balance and attitude. I understand he needs to pay his mortgage or his ex-wife but for me I might as well drive my car with the windows open and throw dollar bills out of the window.

The Old Woman and the Sea

     The longer I work on the mural the more it seems to compare to being at sea for an Atlantic solo crossing by sailboat. I’ve never done ocean sailing single handedly but I have done ocean crossing by sailboat with a crew and I sailed smaller boats single handed. I’ve read books about how it is to be alone at sea. Somehow it fits the picture of what I am doing today. My environment is not as deserted as the wide ocean nor as desperate, and yet I feel like I am in a cocoon, totally immersed in the mural, my mission in life is to finish it.

                    There is no sense of life after the mission is completed. There is hardly any life outside the mural. I am far away from home and although my husband and friends told me they would come over, other things got in the way and frankly I couldn’t care less because I need to be painting. But painting is a lonely job. Hours go by and I find myself totally absorbed in this quest to create this large illusion of space on a two dimensional flat form.

                     It’s my journey and I cannot go back. I left the old coast behind and the new land is not in sight. There is no escape. I am curious how the end will look . Every day there is another challenge. One day it is a challenge to get the horizon right, another day it is about the difficulty of painting the palm trees. I have never seen the whole mural as one big and difficult thing to do; I take it one day at a time; very focused indeed to make it all right to the end- both physically and mentally. There are times that I have to leave the mural alone in an ugly state. It is just because it is a step in preparation for the next one and I am tired; I cannot keep performing endlessly until everything is to my liking. I know I have to deal with visitors who are in shock about the look of this intermediate state of affairs. This is how it is to work in the public eye. Comments and remarks cause mental stress in addition to my own judge sitting on my shoulder.

                   There are times I am up all night because there are problems I haven’t foreseen. Although my plan of working is founded in a thorough understanding of the job through experience, I cannot foresee everything. For example there is the sky really high, 20 feet up in the air, that I wanted to make like a smooth sky disappearing into space. Practically speaking, it is also close the air-conditioning vents that blow dry air on the walls with a force you would not like to have at your home. So while working I realized that my idea was not working and I had to come up with another plan. These kinds of things are the challenge of the job.

             We can all do smooth sailing on a lazy summer afternoon with a light breeze in the bay, and a pleasant sun to warm ourselves. Sailing through thunderstorms need a different approach. It needs preparation for basic needs like drinks and food; it needs focus of a compass course to go back to when the heavy wind throw you off balance. It takes flexibility to fix things adequately when they break and then, when everything is under control there is the challenge of loneliness. You would like to share, but you cannot because this is not a job you can ever do frivolously with more people. I have my friend Aviva working with me at times but there are many details that I have to do alone because of the promise of the design.

                Loneliness is surely a challenge and it is wise to deal with all your problems before going on a big trip like this because they will come out at times of boredom. Funny things from the past pop up out of nowhere but also shameful things, questionable practices that you’ve learned from. Staring over the endless sea without any land in sight for another five weeks can freak any person out, despite the contact through satellite and the internet. Any self-doubt, angst or deeper issues concerning life you have to deal with beforehand because this is just not the right time to do it. Once you are able to overcome these challenges it will make you stronger and fearless in a way that is at the same time humbling.

               I thought I solved all my life’s issues before I embarked on this trip, but I did not count on my husbands issues to become a problem for me, since I was far away. A week before the work was completed he visited Miami and caused a huge drama, followed by a flooding of the apartment and a demand for coming home immediately. Nothing of it changed my plan of working as I insist on being a professional who can deliver.

              It felt however that I had to deal with a hurricane close to the harbor. The forces were overwhelming and staying focused became a challenge. Before the sheer pleasure of painting lifted me up but now that had vanished, and I was only surviving. The colors became dark and I could not seem to achieve the same balance in palette as I had before. I already had exhausted all my energy by the work itself, and now I found myself running on empty. There were broken things that caused dangerous situations; the noise of the building had increased due to moving in. Slamming of doors, pounding of nails and yelling people echoed hard through my system and worked on my nerves. I was afraid to lose my balance on the scaffolding because of fatigue.

             By meditating and painting outdoors I connected to higher energy and avoided a nervous breakdown. It is hard to switch from a frantic mode into slow breathing but once achieved it feels like a miracle. I delivered the mural on September 6^th, with a margin to correct error. I am not sure if my marriage will survive this trial but the mural is a fact.

Wabi Sabi

This story is about broken things and things that never break. My field easel broke. The little folding fishing seat has a screw missing. My computer broke. The machine that was developing my photographs broke. Don’t get me started on the AC that has been broken ever since it was installed. It made me think of all the stuff we rely on a daily basis that is all as weak as its weakest part. My easel for example is one of the sturdiest metal poles with ingenious folding mechanisms you have ever seen. I thought it would never break during a job. When my painting fell on the floor, I discovered that the support was held together by the tiniest piece of plastic.

                  Plastic is one of my least favorite materials, not only does it not break down in nature, the thing itself, whatever it is, breaks easily, making the whole thing absolutely useless and most of all- ugly. This tiny piece of plastic that is now broken into two parts makes the whole easel worthless. The effort of thinking up the concept of making an easel, producing the metal parts, shipping it from China, selling it in a store, all that has been in vain. Nothing but some garbage is left. It cannot even serve another purpose.  

                 People made money of it to feed their kids or buy an easel that now lays useless on the floor, broken. This is really the saddest part of our existence today. Wasting time, energy and money on ill performed jobs, products and buildings. I have nothing against spending money, nor on buying things. I love beautiful things. I love beautiful things that are sturdy enough to withstand time. 

                My friend Michiko explains that in Japan they have a word for these things. (I love having other cultures surrounding me in my daily life, like real Colombian Coffee and Japanese Habits) Wabi Sabi is a name for weathered objects. Old material like a leather chair of 400 years old has wabi sabi. The wood has nicks and dents and some parts are slightly lighter on the higher elevations. It might even be that the varnish is gone altogether. The grease and the dirt in the corners gives this piece of wood an extra dimension being darker and bringing out the engravings.  The chair is not broken. It hardly will break ever.

The design has to be solid and classic. (How about all the modern designers that need to feed their kids too? And the boring bad designs? What about them?) This can be for buildings, furniture, clothes, vehicles, suitcases and what not. The stuff shows years of experience with wind, water, sun and humans. Old Italian villas have this beautiful weathered paint on the outside done by centuries of wind, water and sun exposure. My friend John Adams would say, this brings “soul into the thing.” It has added value because it withstood time.

Nothing that is produced today has the capability of withstanding time because of the power of Economists. These guys studied years to figure out that if we produce things that break easy we will buy more, and  we can feed our kids…(????)  It opens the floodgates for ugly poorly not- well- thought-out things made by smart people but not very conscientious citizens. Nothing that leaves the factory today will be seen by our grandkids, not even durable goods. There are no durable goods any more. China is even worse in producing non-durable goods.

                Thinking about what Michiko said I thought I would break the cycle myself wherever I can to not buy into the system anymore. Instead of buying without thinking about the immediate use of the product I will change my habits.  I will look for the label made in China, than inspect its weakest part, leave it on the shelf and see if I can find a more expensive better product somewhere else.

              In case of the easel, sorry but I will find some wood and make myself a fine folding easel. My father made my very first easel out of driftwood he found on the beach. It was very heavy so I sold it to a fellow student at a time I was hungry but I did not forget how it was made, simple and sturdy, with separate materials that could be replaced. I will make it a special class for my students so they will never forget it either. Maybe the easel will last for centuries to come. It will be a real Wabi Sabi easel that was in Florida, Domburg, and Indianapolis and withstood extreme heat in the Botanical Gardens and terrible freezing cold at Williams Creek. I wonder if Wabi Sabi also was meant for people.

Fieldtrip

Starting a fieldtrip today I remember how hard it used to be and how easy it has become. More than ten years ago I started with the desire to paint a wonderful scene of the Biltmore hotel in Coral Gables. The sun lit the front of it, and I was struck by the intense light and richness of the scene. I felt the urge to capture this beauty in a painting. The desire to express beauty itself, was the initial inspiration.

           I started with the most difficult approach and ruined the most expensive canvas I ever bought. I had purchased pure Belgium linen and stretchers sized 52 inches by 78. My old heavy foldable easel barely fitt in my car. I carried a heavy wooden box with acrylics. It all seems so silly now……. What was I thinking?     

              The size of the painting drew attention. Some idiot with a huge canvas was trying to make a painting, or was it an actress for a comic movie who was waiting for the camera man? I barely had time to concentrate on painting because everybody wanted to know what the heck I was doing. I wanted to be polite and talked patiently to passers-bye about their nephew who was in Art school or their sister in law who was an accomplished painter.

           As soon as I could focus, the evening breeze picked up and the wind got part of the game. The monstrous canvas flew in my face, wet paint and all. I couldn’t handle it. With ultramarine paint stuck in my hair I managed to hold the painting with one hand and dip my brushes into paint with the other when I realized the subject was wrong and the paint was drying too fast.

            The building was the most difficult subject I could dream up. The hotel was orange, lit up by an intense evening sun while I would stand in the shade surrounded by blue green foliage. Creating depth with colors seemed to be an impossible task since the blue tones should be in the background and the warm tones in front. It’s a simple rule I had read somewhere which was easy to remember but hard to achieve. In this case the color of my subject was the furthest away but orange. If I mixed blue and white with it, as I should for receding colors, it became a muddy grey.

            Then there was the enormous amount of detail, not even talking about the architectural challenge itself. The Biltmore Hotel has many small windows and a nick in the building itself so the perspective was difficult. Even now, as an experienced plain air painter I would not go back to the scene because it has more challenges than I am willing to deal with.

            The rather poor choice of it all was my ignorance of how to be a painter. Doing everything wrong is one way of learning. The danger is that one would give up, and never discover the satisfaction of expressing oneself through paint.

           I made a fool of myself and my ego got damaged. The disappointment hit me quite deeply. Many people had encouraged me to become a painter because I was so talented. I did not know that it meant I had to learn and suffer an awful lot. Talent might help a little bit but everybody has to put beginner’s effort into something to be rewarded. I thought I would wake up one morning and just automatically paint anything to satisfaction because that was what I was supposed to do. I felt silly.

             Finally, after many years of hard work I narrowed the art down of travelling light with an easel to the absolute necessities. I have been bitten by mosquitoes, burnt my neck by the blistering sun, threw my acrylics away, left all the big canvasses in the studio, got myself some wide brim hats and a small metal folding easel. Now I only have a tiny shoebox made from wood filled with oil paints, brushes and a palette, which fit in my backpack together with a small fishing stool, turpentine, a roll of paper towels, bug spray, suntan lotion and water. I can walk with this for miles if I have to. Lately I even manage to paint horses on the beach in Holland with a fierce wind in my face without any problem. For fieldtrips I like to work on prepared gatorboard which is light weight and strong. My field easel is easy to carry with the boards which are no bigger than 18×24 inches. I love the outdoors, feel the wind through my hair and see the sun hit my landscape. There is definitely something sacred in the act itself.

Illusion

Five hundred years after Michelangelo was perfecting his technique with lime, pigments and water I have my pick of many different paints to use. In 2010 there are paint stores for house painters and there are arts and craft stores that all present us with numerous amounts of materials. I personally get a little overwhelmed by seeing all that is offered. In the regular house paint stores you can find high and low quality brands for in door and outdoor use, there is latex which is pigments mixed in with water and there are oil based enamels which are pigments mixed with oil and solvents. In the art stores there are acrylics which are water based highly pigmented paints and oil paints for use on canvas. There is gouache which is a chalk-like opaque paint and tempera which is a little bit the same.

              I had to narrow it down in order to use the best of each in what I want to achieve in my mural. The mural has not only an outrageous perspective by depicting people in life size reality but also on the same surface an aerial perspective. No single human eye can see this perspective in reality. Simply impossible. To achieve this depth requires different means in order to create this feeling of spaciousness. The wall is flat after all and it will stay flat. A photograph is flat; two dimensional. This is also because of the use of the same material through out the surface. With print you can already achieve a slight sense of depth by using a flat opaque ink and a transparent glossy ink on top. In paint you can give the illusion of depth in different ways. It is still an illusion but I think you can only do it in paint.

              Artists throughout the ages realized by looking intensely at nature how to create depth in a painting. When there is a little fog you can feel a heightened sense of depth. The blue and white in the far distance creates this. Also the lack of contrast far away, a slightly blurry vision is required to let the viewer’s eye roll over details far away and focus on the foreground. The foreground needs to have everything the far distance does not have. It needs energy and movement, composed from bright colors, reds, oranges, vivid images in high contrast. Sharp edges will make the eye focus on whatever is happening there. The biggest difference between dark and light is in the foreground.

               That all said it seems easy to achieve this. It is just a simple trick and when you follow the rules you will achieve your goal. There is more to it though. The distance is well suited with opaque paints. Using acrylics for the whole mural would be frustrating because they stay transparent and the brushstrokes visible. White in every kind of artistic paint has a tendency to make any color opaque. Mix white in it and the surface becomes flat. The colors mixed with white give this sense of quiet surrender and it creates a beautiful balance with other more vivid parts.

I used for an optimum in depth illusion of the edge of the world an inexpensive Sherwin Williams Ceiling paint. This chalky paint gives the surface a dull look, almost like suede. On top of it in the sky I used pure pigment powder mixed with water and binder. The middle ground is fully painted with the Pittsburgh which I bought in bright colors so I am able to mix them at my convenience. On top of this paint I will add very thin layers of acrylic to make the transition between the foreground and the distance. Close-up will have either an eggshell or shiny acrylic paint on a super flat surface. The surface needs to be doubly prepared without any flaws: drippings, cracks or other irregularities.

People ask me about varnish. We are used to varnishing pieces of art to preserve them for eternity. If it were an outdoor piece I would do this to protect the painting from mildew and ultraviolet rays. The mural at the Alumni Building will not have a coat of varnish higher than the life size images. That layer of varnish will protect it from sticky fingers and coincidental bumps. The rest will stay as is because the dull quality of the paint in the distance serves to add to the illusion of depth. If the rules were not too strict I would add some high quality oil paint to the people in the foreground because oil provides such brilliant colors that simply aren’t the same with acrylics. Water based paint on top of oil paint would allow the painting to easily chip, and take with it the characters I have tried so hard to capture.

Michelangelo

Five hundred years ago Michelangelo painted his Sistine Chapel in Italy . Although he was known in his time as being an excellent craftsman, he was not as famous as he is today. The word artist and artisan had almost the same meaning, and both were doing the same things, one being more talented or advanced than the other. Unlike today where the meaning of the word artist seems to represent someone who makes ugly and hard to understand visual things, and artisan is someone who makes quilts. I think I am both.

              I still use the same materials as Michelangelo; the whole process is really not that far away from what he had been doing to make a mural. That is where I see myself as an artisan. The work drawings are also in scale and divided into one inch squares. The squares represent one foot squares on the wall. In Michelangelo’s time they would first make large templates on paper with one foot squares. Copying carefully every figure in line on paper, with the squares as a guide a new drawing would evolve. One or more assistants would make holes on the lines with a sharp pin (icepick), then with charcoal powder wrapped in cheesecloth they made a ball on a stick. With this stick they pounded the black powder through the holes onto the wall.

              Today I skip the templates because I have the help of electric projectors. I still use charcoal, a very old form of drawing tool, to draw my projections onto the wall. Once drawn on the wall with the squares still visible, it looks the same as a phase of Michelangelo’s wall. I then use a new odorless, eco-friendly Pittsburg latex paint to make the under painting in a warm terra cotta. The glow of this color will eventually shine through and give the mural a warm feeling.

                In the old days they would use burnt sienna for this step. I contemplated using this as a pigment but decided not to do it because I would have to grind it and make it every time on the spot and it would not have a good consistency. I have many one pound paper bags with pigments bought in Holland and Colombia . (It caused trouble in security at the airports; we live in a modern world after all. The white and the red, I learned, resemble cocaine and gunpowder respectively )

                 To make the paint with the Gold Ochre pigment I grind the pigment on a glass plate with distilled water. This brings out the color. If I would use it like this it would become powder again and fall off the wall so I need a binder to make it stick. In the old days that could have been rabbit skin glue, like wall paper glue, but today I just buy acrylic binder. I don’t pride myself in using only old school methods. I use the earth tones of raw pigment because of its beauty.

               After years and years practicing on many walls in Miami Dade County I mastered this technique which gives a natural wavy look that I cannot seem to achieve other wise. If you leave the paint like this it will release color through oxidation and stay brilliant for years to come. Much like leather, the older the pigment gets the more beautiful it will become. Michelangelo used to buy his pigments at special markets and the blue, made of Lapis Lazuli was one of the most expensive ones. He used a lot of it because his patrons wanted to show how wealthy they were. I only use the earth tones because they are the most pure and not made of chemicals.

                  For the final painting I will use high quality latex paint and eventually acrylics with a slow drying medium mixed in. To achieve a realistic look I need slow drying time to blend in the different tones. Normally I would do this with oil paint which can be applied on top of an acrylic base, but since we want to have a “green” building I will not do this. Today we have other means.

          The mural at the University of Miami is small compared to Michelangelo’s job and I am not nearly as advanced in the skills as he is but at least I know I am in good company.