Katharine Scarfe Beckett

Monday, 3 September 2012

Egg tempera spots and stripes

Egg tempera is wonderful -- just translucent enough to show the colours underneath new brushstrokes, but opaque enough for each layer to hold its own.

Here's the piece I'm experimenting with:

It's about a third done, I think. Large areas are going to receive another two or three layers of feathery furry texture. The whole piece is about 230 X 395 mm. Rather large for a miniature? ... except that there is no good reason for a miniature to be small. (The post on that is below.)

This vellum is an interesting piece. It had cockled during production and when it went into the sanding machine (so I understand from the manufacturers) the cockles sanded preferentially, giving it a curiously spotted appearance, which, with the veining, I've been working with to develop the background and the leopard spots on the 'dad' figure.

Haven't decided how to handle the white circles yet. They are gorgeous in real life, showing the vellum surface. But for reasons that will become clear below, I'm thinking they need to be coated with at least a glaze of egg and water.

I'm using a combination of broad thin coatings of paint like glazes, applied with a size 6, and short hairline brushstrokes to build up a furry texture, applied with a 000. Here you can see part of the bottom edge of the cloud with close-up of the little furry lines. There are a lot of these already, and an awful lot more to come.

Yellow ochre over lapis lazuli produces a pleasing very dark stone grey. A small quantity of titanium white mixed into rust and brushed in hairlines over blue layers generates a startlingly luminous violet. So startling in the context of what I wanted to paint that I scraped that section off. The dark section pictured below left shows a much more restrained spectrum including less violent purple.

The paint dries tender to start with, and can pick up scratches and scuffmarks in its first few days. After two months, it seems tougher.

Saturday, 2 June 2012

Usually, egg tempera is painted onto gesso on a rigid substrate (usually, wood). I'm planning something different, and wanted first to find out whether egg tempera could be painted directly onto vellum. Two animal proteins in contact -- you'd think they would bind well. So far, so good. I'm working with lazurite powder from Cornelissen's, very brilliant in hue, if a little gritty; titanium white watercolour, for body and opacity, and milkiness; and two tubes of iron oxide -- rust from a horse-trough in the case of the redder colour -- sent by a good art friend. Eggs come from the local supermarket. Egg tempera is very enjoyable to work with, so far. It dries fast, but on vellum not as fast as it would on gesso. It can be washed to some extent, pooled, and pushed around a little for interesting effects. Degrees of impasto appear possible. It layers beautifully. Washing white over the top of translucent colours transforms them into a new palette. And unlike those meticulous painters who work on gesso, if I don't like something I've done I can simply scrape my dry paint back down to the vellum, and start again. Whether the egg will stay on the vellum is another matter. In my bones I feel it ought to remain flexible enough to rest there indefinitely. But in a few hundred years my bones will be in bad shape and so may the egg. A trip to the British Library is planned to help answer this question. Meanwhile, there is a society of egg tempera painters to refer to -- their forums are especially useful -- and the inimitable John at Nuncketest.

Tuesday, 4 October 2011

Obscure Histories

Around two and a half years ago, I started working with a brilliant sculptor and medieval scholar, Adriana Hartley, in Geneva. We agreed that she would make abstract modern smoked ceramic sculptures playing with relationships between rectilinear forms and curves, rough surfaces and smooth planes -- and then I would paint fourteenth-century-style miniatures on them.

I got very excited by the relationship between form and surface, two dimensional representative art and three-dimensional space. I tried to paint so that the third dimension was always a necessary element in the miniature, and so that the story in the miniature related closely to the form and 'feel' of the piece and drew the viewer's eye to the individual beauties and characteristics of each shape.

Our work process was great. Adriana sculpted independently of any considerations about what the painting might be, other than to include some smooth areas as part of the form of the sculpture. When each sculpture was a complete piece and fired safely, we met and discussed what its qualities were and which way (roughly) the theme of the painting might go. The final stage was for me to go ahead and develop a miniature painting on the sculpture, and Adri left me to create that as a new independent stage of the work.

(In fact either of us had veto power on something we truly felt we couldn't live with that the other was doing -- but it was used only once during the creation of nineteen large pieces and around thirty tiny ones -- and used to good effect.)

We exhibited our pieces in Galerie Marianne Brand in Geneva as part of the Carouge Art7 festival. The response was amazingly positive and we sold a lot too, which was a very welcome affirmation of the work.

I was struck by the way visitors responded to the combination of sculpture and miniature as a pictorial object in a three-dimensional space. They got up close and stuck their noses in the hollows, used magnifying glasses to see the details, walked round and round the pieces to get the flow of the story. The picture and sculpture together were interesting to the eye and mind in a way that either, independently, might not have been. We had achieved our goal -- a synergy of surface and volume, decoration and structure, fiction and presence, figurative and abstract.

To our great delight, the prestigious Musée Ariana purchased our most ambitious (and largest) piece. I hope to return to Geneva in 2012 and go with Adri to see it on display.

Thursday, 11 August 2011

The miniature as an art-form

Of course a miniature is a small painting. But who says "miniature" means "small"?

Here's the fabulous Online Etymology Dictionary with its entry for miniature:

1580s (n.) "a reduced image," from It. miniatura "manuscript illumination or small picture," from pp. of miniare "to illuminate a manuscript," from L. miniare "to paint red," from minium "red lead," used in ancient times to make red ink. Extended sense of "small" (adj.) is first attested 1714, because pictures in medieval manuscripts were small, influenced by L. min-, root expressing smallness (minor, minimus, minutus, etc.).

(My bold.)

In other words, "miniature" didn't originally mean "small". It meant "painted in an illuminated-book style" and, before that, "decorated in red", as in red-letter days, rubrication, all that.

As for why "red-lead pigment" was called minium: it's apparently named after the place it was naturally found in Roman times, in north-west Spain somewhere near the Minius (Minho, Miño) River. That's from Wikipedia.

So, the modern word "miniature" only means "small" because miniated paintings (ie paintings created in an illuminated-manuscript style) were themselves small. Such book miniatures were small because they were painted in fine detail using tiny brushstroked lines of gouache or tempera, which took a long time, and because illuminated books were not usually the size of large canvases, the price of calfskin being what it was. (Even more expensive now.)

However, one could in theory paint using an illuminated-manuscript style in fine detail using tiny brushstroked lines of gouache or tempera ... on an enormous ground. It would be a gorgeous paradox -- an enormous miniature.

Really, there is no good reason other than tradition and time why a miniature has to be a certain size. Admittedly, those are good enough reasons for most people most of the time, but they are arbitrary reasons too, and could be ignored.