Mistakes: fixative doesn’t seem to fix very soft pencil. Even with multiple layers and left overnight the pencil still smears easily when rubbed with a finger.
Solution: I rubbed out all the excess pencil so the drawing became much lighter and also that helped to eliminate smearing. It also gave a chance to the paint layers to dominate and the sketch underneath to become less important, almost like a distant memory, but still visible, a bit more mysterious. Trying out different hues of Liquitex Cadmium Red.
Mistakes: areas where the medium was laid on thicker result in paint not sticking to the surface so well. It’s very easy to accidentally rub away too much paint and then I end up having to reapply multiple layers. What should I try to do differently: sand the surface once the medium is dry? Try a different medium?
Listening to: Rosalia, I enjoy not understanding most of the words and just gicing into the emotional depth and intensity of her music. I grasp some words, which make me think of the spirituality and divine power of female goddesses, and the female connection to the cosmic ans spiritual forces of nature, of women from Audrey Large’s Collaboration with the V&A A Contemporary Response at Saatchi, a response to Anna Traquaiar’s The Months of the Year. Large was “moved to respond to this work as women were once the guardians of calendrical knowledge, which was condemned as evidence of witchcraft. The only surviving traces of this knowledge are in witch trial testimonies, which have unwittingly preserved fragments of otherwise erased wisdom.” I am moved by Large’s attempt to “inscribe the lost voices of women into matter” using digital processes to carve out their stories in an imperfectly shaped vase, Examples:
SHE BLESSED THE SEED WITH ALE AND MILK, AND POURED REMAINDER TO THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE FIELD FOR LUCK AND INCREASE.
LUCIA – SHE LAID CRUSHED FENNEL SEED ON THE BELLY OF THE WOMAN IN TRAVAIL TO EASE THE PANGS.
