No Place I'd Rather Be

The trouble with painting is that once I start, it's very difficult to stop. If I didn't have dinner to make or keep to any sort of a schedule, I would surely spend the entire day still in my pajamas blissfully working on a piece of art. Sometimes I can arrange to work for long blocks of time and may even pull an all-nighter to finish a painting or meet a deadline. The process is so absorbing I hardly notice the passage of hours and can accomplish a great deal in one sitting.


My studio is located on the third floor of an old house that has withstood three major hurricanes and over a hundred years of everyday family life. An example of Queen Anne architecture, it was built when the trolley once ran from Providence into the Edgewood neighborhood of Cranston. It has a resident ghost, an elderly woman in a pink dress who appeared the day our family moved in. She likes her privacy, but I believe that she silently keeps me company while I work. To honor her, when we renovated the stairway up to the third floor we asked our carpenter to inlay a fragment of china picturing a lady wearing pink right into the woodwork.

Two arched windows facing west and south offer views of the street, neighbors' houses, and some silver maple tree tops. It's quiet for the most part, and when I paint on my easel using the natural light from the west window I can observe everything happening on the sidewalk below.

Once the sun goes down I move over to my drawing board and work under artificial light, usually on pencil drawings or watercolors. If you look closely you can see that I'm a loyal Nick Cave fan. When I play CDs, his songs are among my favorites. I often listen to the radio while I work streaming WXRT in Chicago or Elizabeth Cook's Apron Strings on Sirius Outlaw Country.

I agree with Albert Einstein's opinion that a cluttered mind is better than an empty one and embrace that belief regarding my studio space. It has become a repository for all the interesting found objects, decorative materials, and vintage parts I've scored at flea markets, yard sales, consignment shops, and the curbside on the eve of trash pick up. Everything I collect is potentially useful and sooner or later becomes part of a piece of my artwork.

When it come to painting though, I try to keep things pretty neat. I use a disposable palette, torn up 

t-shirts for rags, recycled plastic container tops to hold a small amount of Winsor & Newton Liquin Fine Detail gloss medium, Turpenoid odorless solvent in a lidded jar, and a variety of Rembrandt oil paints along with Permalba white. I enjoy working on a toned ground moving from dark to light. 

When I began the musical tree painting, I used Photoshop Elements to create a white lined grid on the photo collage proportional to 24" x 30." I added an additional layer of gesso to a commercially prepared linen canvas of that same size and then coated it with a mixture of burnt umber, burnt sienna, and ultramarine blue acrylic paint. Once that had dried, I drew a matching actual size grid on the dark canvas with white charcoal pencil and transferred the composition using a fine brush and white acrylic paint.

At this point I began using oil paint and blocked in rough areas of color filling most of the canvas in one sitting. While the paint was still wet I refined shapes and enhanced some of the blocks of color.

The effect of the dark ground peeking through "cracks" around small shapes of a lighter color created a convincing tree bark texture. While the paint was still wet I scratched repeatedly with a palette knife revealing more of the dark underpainting.

The next day or so after the paint had completely dried, I began to glaze objects with a mixture of Liquin, solvent, and a small amount of color. This unified areas of scumbling where paint of one color was lightly dragged over the surface leaving another color exposed beneath it. 

The hand and skirt below are good examples of scumbling where the dark ground peeks through.

Glazing with dark color can also be used to create the illusion of transparent shadows.

Leaves were then added to the background in tiny daubs of bright color and a splayed brush was used to imitate boughs of pine needles. The brush sacrificed its life for the painting.

I began refining objects and correcting my drawing, adding lights and then deepening them with glaze before adding more lights on top. Eventually the values struck the proper balance as amazing textures and unexpected color combinations evolved.

                       

I spent a lot of time on the figure of the woman feeling as if I was painting one of those Victorian miniatures on ivory. Possibly because the face was so tiny, I struggled to get a resemblance to the original photo of Catherine. In the end the  woman demanded her own identity, and although there is something of Catherine in her eyes, I decided to let her be and move on. As I continued to finish the painting, the plot for my story began to gel. She did not look happy to me and I came up with a reason why. I also decided that she wasn't the main character "Zadie." She was her mother and I decided to call her "Cora."

With an end of the painting in sight and a plot of a story to start typing, I worked on finishing the arms of the musicians integrating their shoulders into the tree bark. I paid attention to the background and described a little better the gravestones and church steeple. A dark glaze on the landscape helped to deepen the shadows.

Remember that nice clean palette I started out with? This is what it usually looks like at the end of a day of painting. It's always a pleasure to be able to rip off the top sheet and start fresh again every morning.

With the deadline of a show the painting was to be exhibited in only a couple of days away, I chugged away making progress detailing the instruments, fleshing out the musicians' arms, continuing to add colored leaves, and texturing the tree bark.

To place strings on the instruments I laid the canvas flat and used a transparent plastic straight edge to guide my hand. Each string required a quick, one shot stroke using a fine tipped brush loaded with just enough white paint. Once the lines had dried, I covered them with a transparent dark glaze so they weren't too obvious. Proud of myself for finishing the guitar without making any smudges, I realized that I had given it only five strings. That wouldn't do, so I had to wipe it all off and start again.

After many hours of detail work, the painting, Serenade, was finally ready for me to sign my name and date it in the lower left corner. I stayed up all night finishing it in preparation for the Cambridge Art Association small group show "Process Explored" that was to be set up the following day. At 6:15 AM when the birds started singing and the sun came up, I popped it into a frame and started loading the car with the rest of my drawings and paintings for the trip to Cambridge.

Once my work was up in the gallery, it was time to go back home for some sleep and get ready for the opening. This is a photo of the five artists who participated in the show. It was a great opportunity to show my drawings and paintings at University Place in Cambridge, and wonderful to meet and work with this group of talented artists.

Janice Corkin Rudolf, Greg Spitzer, Nedret Andre, Brenda van der Beek, and Wendy Brusick

In the days that followed the opening of the show I completed the first draft of a short story based on the painting Serenade. I titled it Afternoon Hymn and published it on my website: wendybrusick.com. Feel free to read it and send me your comments!

Birth of a Painting

     In all probability, the lives of these three women never intersected. However, in only a few weeks they will be linked together in a work of art that will transcend their individual identities. I happen to know that the one on the far right was christened Catherine Elizabeth and there’s no mistaking the name of the accordion player. The woman in the middle posed for this picture in a Brooklyn, New York studio, but her name remains a mystery. I collect vintage photographs, picking them up at flea markets and antique shops wherever I travel. Sorting through boxes of daguerreotypes, portrait postcards or mid-century snapshots, I choose images of anonymous people who speak to me with an interesting expression or unusual pose. I’m especially drawn to women in beautiful period clothing. As a rule, I only select sharply focused photographs with a dominant light source to use as a reference in creating my artwork.

     Back in my studio I examine each portrait thoroughly and muse about what kind of personality that individual had. A curious face nestled in a large group invites me to speculate what relationship they had to the others. I’m not interested in learning who these people actually were, but invent my own fantasies about them and sometimes even assign them names. After scanning an image, I enlarge it on my laptop using Photoshop Elements and scrutinize every pixel to discover details often missed with the naked eye. Jewelry, books and furniture used as props, and even physical anomalies like a missing finger or scar add to my story. I never forget a face in my portrait collection and all the information gleaned from studying these images subconsciously percolates while I go about my daily tasks. In time, connections are made within my realm of personal experience and surreal images bubble up into my conscious mind. If an idea is powerful enough, it becomes the impetus for a new painting. 

     One hot summer night shortly after I brought Sharyn the accordion player home from an antique mall in the midwest, I cursed that late afternoon cup of coffee when I had trouble sleeping. I tossed and turned in what I like to call “blue sleep.” That’s when my mind gets stranded between dreaming and awareness and goes on autopilot continuing to work. It can be annoying if I’m hoping for complete rest, but the interesting images and solutions to creative problems that come to me during the night often pay off. I also experience a similar state conducive to creative thought just upon awaking in the early morning. That night I imagined Sharyn in a forest playing her accordion to the birds. Accordion players for the most part stand and sway as they play, so an image of a tree playing the accordion swaying in the wind came into my mind. The idea became so intriguing that I gave up on trying to get some sleep and went into my studio to make this sketch:

     Needless to say, I yawned a lot and didn’t get much work done the next day, but it was important for me to document the idea for a possible painting while it remained vivid in my mind.

     Along with Sharyn, I also brought back several old family snapshots that a friend in Chicago graciously offered me. A double exposure of two women at the door of a stone building and a ghostly bicyclist piqued my interest. Maybe I've watched too many "Dr. Who" episodes, but the concept of time dimensions fascinates me and this photographic illusion suggested the coexistence of two worlds. The structure reminded me of a mausoleum, the kind with a heavy metal gate that offers a peek at shadowy marble vaults and a rich stained glass window on the back wall.

     

     People close to me are familiar with my passion for old cemeteries. When my kids were little, if we drove by one on a country road they would groan because they knew I would have to stop and read a few epitaphs. I’ve studied the 17th and 18th century funerary motifs found carved on slate and brown stone markers all over New England and am especially fond of the early winged skulls. I often photograph gothic and neoclassical cemetery sculptures for reference in my work and enjoy the poignant verses on these monuments. The interesting names and facts on the stone markers reveal relationships among those buried together and easily generate my own version of a Spoon River Anthology. In these beautiful places where the tangible meets the ethereal, I sometimes entertain the romantic notion that resident spirits communicate with each other in a surreal community undetected by living visitors.

   

     As August wore on, the secret life of cemeteries and accordion playing trees simmered on a back burner in my mind as I went about my normal tasks. After bringing my son back to college in Vermont, I stopped in Montpelier at an antique shop and bought a couple of vintage photos before winding my way home to Rhode Island. Taking back roads and stopping for an occasional photograph, I happened upon a quaint old iron gated cemetery in a small Massachusetts town.

     It was late in the afternoon when I walked down a hill into the heart of the picturesque cemetery and waited until the last rays of sunlight pushed through a gap in the clouds so I could capture the exaggerated shadows the stones would make upon the grass. Looking up toward the road I photographed a small grove of trees with a white New England church in the background and immediately knew that this would be the setting for “the painting.”

     By now I was pretty invested in bringing my "trees making music" idea to life. Working with the cemetery photos on my laptop, I began to fool around in Photoshop making a rough photo collage using clippings of musicians and scanned vintage images. The accordion player worked in my drawing, but she didn’t seem right for the sturdy trees in the grove.

     My husband and I enjoy any kind of live music, especially Americana/Roots. I'm always acquiring shots of musicians for my picture files and sunny outdoor concerts provide wonderful opportunities to photograph performers. The July 23rd Swamp Stomp IV here in Rhode Island was no exception when one of our favorite bands, Joe Fletcher and The Wrong Reasons, put on a terrific show like they always do. That day along with lots of great shots I seemed to get a large concentration of arms and hands playing instruments.

Joe Fletcher and The Wrong Reasons

     Using clips from that recent musical photo shoot, Joe became the central guitar playing tree. After trial and error experimenting with other instruments, I settled on this trio. The original middle of the night sketch included a woman and I decided that this surreal band should be serenading more than the birds in the cemetery.

     Enter the woman from Brooklyn. I liked her dress, but the pedestal didn’t make sense. I also wanted a woman with a more intriguing expression.

     I tried Catherine's head on her body and liked the effect. Then I constructed a gravestone for her to lean on. In order to make the figure more prominent I decided to simplify the composition. Cropping out the bass playing tree did the trick. Now the finished concept is ready to put on canvas. A story has developed along with the image, and this morning I woke up with a plot to think about while I paint. Did I mention that I also write fiction? The only thing I will share right now is that the woman listening to the music is called "Zadie."