Egret taking off

I examined the painting after the paint had dried and decided that the circles were too neat and tidy.  I was hoping that they would be a bit more rambunctious.  They were on the quiet side as they stood.  I also found out that certain colors didn't cover too well.  For example the green or yellow did not adequately masked the blue whereas the copper seemed overpowering.  

My remedy was to introduce some chaos; by drawing some really loose circles with a white gel pen, and by sprinkling fine drops of ink onto the paper.  I was hoping the "noise" made by the obvious, yet subtle fine white lines and the dots of black ink could make the painting more interesting, by distracting from the vapid concentric circles.

 With that out of the way, I worked on the bird.

I had intended to use the grey and white metallic paint from the assortment that I bought but I decided against it after some thought.  I didn't think metallic feathers would be appropriate for egret but more importantly I could use the matte finish of the egret to contrast with the shiny metallic paint. 

Using my Chinese round brush, I started to write in the neck and feathers in the void that was provided by my cutout mask.

Traits of discrete Chinese calligraphy brushstrokes were evident with the feathers and the feet.

I was really eager to see my new baby.  I was just like an expectant parent.  I did not waste anytime wet mounting my new piece.  The wet painting looked so different from the back, without the metallic sheen.  Instead it was bathed in this mysterious vat of colors.  The white bird really stood out, as if it was leaping out of the paper.

Even from the front, the white egret looked so real.  I was really glad that I eschewed the metallic acrylic on the bird.

I decided to make the feathers on the wing less perfect by writing in a torn feather.  No I wasn't being pedantic.  I did it not because I should, but because I could.  It's akin to adding a zit on an otherwise fine portrait of a face.  That was the child in me playing games with my subject. 

The most interesting thing about this painting was that it looked very different under various lighting conditions.  It was like a chameleon.  Or a silk brocade.  The color and the mood changed depending on how the painting was illuminated.

 

Round and round and round

After experimenting with my newly acquired airbrush on my String Theory-themed pieces, I realized it was something I wanted to pursue further. With practice, I’m confident I could master the technique. At the very least, it would provide me with hours of amusement..  

I am fortunate to have a body of water behind my residence, such that the reflections of surrounding foliage on the water are both tantalizing and mesmerizing.  

I’ve decided to paint water with a multitude of colors using my airbrush.

This time, I’m adding a twist by using metallic paint. I associate the shimmer of water with the sparkle of metallic paint, and I hope it will bring a some impressionistic realism.

I have a bottle of gold metallic acrylic paint that I use for my gilded calligraphy on greeting cards. I experimented with it in my airbrush to see if it would work.

However, I quickly realized that the acrylic paint was too thick to aerosolize. It was quite different from trying to airbrush ink or watercolor. I had to dilute it significantly to make it spray. Unfortunately, the resulting spray was too watery, and I worried that the metallic sparkle would be lost.

But I was wrong! The sparkle returned after the paint dried, which was surprisingly fast. Repeated spraying helped build up the color saturation.

Encouraged by my success, I ordered a box of 18 colors metallic acrylic pouring paint from an online store. I thought the pouring paint might be less viscous. Instead of using special solvents, I diluted the paint with plain water. I assumed that the label said the paint was water-based, so I figured water would be an acceptable diluent.  

 

The painting I had in mind was about a white egret taking off from water, which was dotted with circular ripples.  I figured since I had no control of the air brush, I could at least spray round circles, over and over again.  It would be like doodling.  Child's play. This is absolutely contrary to what I was taught in Chinese Brush, in that we tried not to cover up our brushstrokes with repetitions.

I decided I was braving new frontiers (new toy actually) and I would not genuflect to the strict doctrines of traditional Chinese Brush.  I used the thin translucent cicada skin Xuan however.  The paper had a nice natural sheen to it.

I knew where I wanted to position my egret so I cut out a template for my bird.  I used that template to block out any sprays from my air brush.  With that done I proceeded to spray my background with a blue metallic acrylic.

I was using a chopstick to mix and dilute my paint in the paint receptacle.  I didn't want to waste whatever paint that was clinging to my chopstick, so I dapped the paper with the stick to form circles like ripples.  I had this wild idea of modeling my ripples.  I kneaded strings using my scrap Xuan paper and I fashioned them into circles and plotted them on the paper.

Well that was a disaster.  The strings of paper were so light that any spray from the air brush would blow them out of place.  It was an exercise in futility.  Even the cutout mask I made for my egret had to be weighted down.  It took me about 5 seconds to realize how stupid my idea was.  Free-hand spray it would be.  After all the whole idea of doing ripples was so that precision was not called for, taking into account that this was something novel for me.

I kept reaching for different colors from my box of 18, using both the air brush and regular brush (it took time to clean out my air brush after each spray, since the acrylic dries rather quickly and can clot up my sprayer).  I seemed to have painted with aplomb, which in reality I was too naïve to worry about whether the lines were in the right place or not.  The spray was sort of diluted and wet.  The diluted paint made it difficult to see if there was overlap or coverage or how wide the spray pattern was.  After a while nothing mattered anymore.  I could picture myself with a robotic arm, seemingly dancing with a mind of its own.  Gyrating to the cadence of the hiss from the airbrush. 

What made it more difficult, or interesting, was that depending on where the light source was, different colors would manifest.  The photos showed the void left by my mask of the egret.

 

Acid -free Archival

I vented my frustration with the high price of a custom frame in my Tail wagging the dog post.  A keen-eyed reader pointed out some specifics of the price quote that might have escaped my attention.

The word "Preservation" might be the culprit.  

The cover of the frame might be UV blocking non-reflective glass or acrylic.

The mat and backing board were stated to be acid-free archival, which meant resistance to yellowing and degradation.

The whole notion was to preserve the framed material, and this added level of protection was different from a run of the mill picture frame that I could have picked up from the shelves.

The well meaning point was well taken.  In fact the first hurdle I needed to cross in those rare occasions that I would be talking to galleries was that I could not vouch for the fact that my works were done on acid-free archival paper.  None of my various Xuan paper would state that they are acid-free or archival.  In the litigious society that I live in, a wanton affirmation could steer me into false representation.  Thus I couldn't even set foot in the doors of such galleries.   

The fact of the matter was that I was just looking for a flat-bed trailer for hauling, but instead I went for a gilded carriage. 

My bad!!

I have a habit of pinning my scraps and practice works on the wall.  In one forgotten corner of my room I noticed something shocking, quite by chance I might add,

I noticed the bottom of the stack had numerous holes in the paper.

Whereas the scrap immediately on top did not,

The piece of paper on the bottom became food for the silverfish.  

When my house had cedar shingles as roofing I had constant problems with silverfish.  That infestation went away after I switched over to composite roofing.

That leads to a point that I shall make.  When making my starch glue, I've always added a few grains of mothball to the mix.  The camphor in the mothball helped to ward off pests like the silverfish.   The fact that my mounted pieces were not affected albeit hanging at the same place could be a testament to the effectiveness of the mothball.  Perhaps this was my acid-free archival method of preservation. 

I had a student complained that she was getting a headache from the stench of mothball while learning how to do wet mounting.  Perhaps I used too much?  Now that I've run out of mothball, I am using a few drops of tea tree oil instead.

Seems to do the trick, but I don't think I have a silverfish problem anymore to validate my new formula.  

 

String Theory dot 2

After my first run of airbrush on gold speckled Xuan using alum solution, I thought I would try the same thing on regular Xuan.  Un-sized, raw Xuan.  I was really hoping that the alum solution would behave differently on regular Xuan, and that I could paint from the back of that paper, as I had alluded to in my last blog.

My head was no longer occupied with juxtaposing wild ideas of dimensions and gravity and whatnots.  I would just focus of the technical details this time and enjoy my airbrush.  I told myself.

Seeded my regular un-sized Xuan with my gold "strings".

Wrote in my comic strands with alum solution.

Gingerly sprayed the paper with my airbrush.  Holding my breath to see what the paper reveals.  Apparently the crease in the center of the Xuan took center stage.  The bulge created shadows as a result of some of the sprays not being able to reach the paper.  Interesting!

After further spraying to make the color more saturated, this was the result:

The alum solution laden brushstrokes were not as apparent as those done on the gold speckled Xuan.

Instead the painting seemed to be cloaked in enigma.  The shadows from the crease in the center of the paper actually added to the mystical nuance of the painting.  Serendipitously!  I could see a faint, but definite representation of a vortex with a dark center.  Reminded me of whirlpools.  Was that how "strings" act I wonder.  

My reason for trying the dot 2 version on regular un-sized Xuan was to demonstrate what alum solution does to the back of the paper.  The following photo showed the back of this painting.

Closeup of a area on the back of the Xuan, showing marks left by the alum solution from the front of the paper, notice the very distinct white outlines of the brushstrokes.  

The voids were actually brushstrokes done with alum solution and it blocked full seepage of color from the front.  The colored areas were those devoid of alum. 

By over-spraying the void with color again, I was able to overpower the resist property of alum and shaped my cosmos somewhat.

Close examination of the photo showed all the intricate white filaments rendered with alum solution.  One might say that this was soiling.  Reminded me of sweating on shower doors.  

Soiling done deliberately.  

I couldn't conclude this blog without showing the front and back of this painting,

Front

Back

Which side would you display?

The reveal

I had laid the ground work for my String Theory painting.  I got sidetracked by my desire to purchase a custom frame.  That was a bad experience.

I needed something to bring me out of my sulking.

So I got myself a new toy.

Yes, an airbrush!  A hand-held, rechargeable one.  Seems like it would be fun.

Well I am not ashamed to admit that I am willing to put my brushes aside, temporary at least, and give my new toy a run.

What better piece to experiment on than my String Theory?  

 

I've never touched an airbrush before but that makes it more exciting.  I am not spraying enamel or model paint.  I am spraying ink and watercolor essentially so I shouldn't worry about clogging up my toy.  I should be expecting better results than using my brush to write in the background color.

Right away the mist from the sprayer caused the paper to wrinkle.  The wrinkling interestingly enough was along the alum solution brushstrokes.  I believe the difference in absorption between the alum painted and non-alum painted areas was sufficient to cause the paper to wrinkle along those lines.  

My phthalo blue solution was too diluted to reveal the alum solution succinctly, but the tracks were quite visible nonetheless.  Notice my initial attempt to outline where the alum solutions should be written on the upper right hand corner.  In the end I decided it was too cumbersome so I just did everything freehand.

After several passes with my airbrush, the flame like features of my string soup emerged quite interestingly.  At first I was going to spray the whole sheet the same color, but then I liked the bands of clear spaces so I left them blank.  I also mixed in a little green color.  Martians are green, aren.t they?

After the paper had dried, I examined what had manifested.  It had that cosmic look!

The spray was not as uniform as I had envisioned.  That was a lot of fun however.  I could see all those little white filaments inside the big blue torrent.  Streams of hot radiation spewing from black holes.

I am sure I could improve on my spraying technique given sufficient time.

When I turned the gold speckled Xuan over, I did not see any seepage of the alum to the back of the paper.  This was kind of disappointing for me.  Part of the fun of painting with alum solution was to paint on the back side of the paper, taking advantage of the soak-through of alum from the front side.  Ostensibly this gold speckled paper was less permeable to alum solution as I had anticipated.

I employed this painting from the backside technique with my snow scenes.  Such as this one:

I played around with my painting by turning it upside down.  The piece was abstract enough that there was no telling as to which side is north.  

What I perceived now was a crashing wave, on a foaming sea.

Forget my string theory.  After all that contemplating about what the first moments might be like, I was still painting water, unknowingly.  I've gone off the deep end and back again. 

The sea was more convincing anyways and a lot less abstract.  No need to consider green Martians. 

Interesting!

Tail wagging the dog

I did some minor alteration to a recent landscape painting.  I augmented the phthalo blue patch and garnished it with a few dots of  green label#1.  It looked contemporary and yet classic at the same time.

Looked decent.

I normally make my own frames for works of weird dimensions.  For the popular formats I would just buy picture frames when they are on sale.  My landscape painting required a 20 in x 40 in frame.  That means custom made.

Instead of dusting off my miter saw and buying poplar stock from the lumber yard, I thought my painting deserved a proper frame.  I was sure a proper frame would make my painting more "legit".

Off to the local art supply store I went.  I buy my non-Chinese brush related supplies there.  Things like mat boards and cutting blades and gel mediums.  This art supply store happens to have a custom framing counter.

I presented my painting.  I was looking for a skinny black frame (not a cocktail dress, mind you).  The simple classic thin-black-rim frame to house my painting.  I conveyed my wishes to the people behind the counter.  Nothing fancy, just utilitarian.  

This was the printout of the work sheet:

I didn't plan to go in there as a joke.  I had all the intentions of getting a proper frame.  But it wasn't meant to be.

The price quoted me was $1560.  Yes, that was one thousand five hundred and sixty US dollars!  For a 20 in x 40 in skinny black frame.  The customer service person said that without batting an eyelash.

I was speechless.  I must be out of touch.  Really?  I could have bought a skinny black cocktail dress!

Or a shower stall kit!  I was naïve.  I was ignorant. 

I know galleries take a cut of 30 to 40 percent of whatever they sell.  They need to pay utility bills and rent and labor.  I understand.

So for me to recoup my $1560 investment in frame and  based on a 30% commission I needed to charge $2166.

That would be my overhead, just for the frame.

If I was so brash as to dare to ask for $1000 for my efforts, I needed to mark up my painting to $1429 to allow for the 30% commission.  

That meant my modest painting with the "custom" frame needed to seek $3595 in the gallery in order to reward myself with $1000 for my artistry and efforts.  To earn my one thousand dollars I must first cough up $1560 and set a retail price of $3595 and hope some idiot would buy my painting for that ridiculous sum.

Tell me it ain't so.  Please!

Something is not right.  The dog should be wagging its tail, not the other way around.

String Theory

I was chatting up a storm with my bunch of nerdy pals. We do not eschew any topics, including sensitive topics like politics and religion.  Nothing is too sacred with us. Pun intended.

What started our conversation was the topic of consciousness.  None of us have any erudition in this field.  This is something that everybody seems to understand yet few could use concrete words to define.  Perhaps we all have different words or interpretation or ideas for what consciousness is but we assume that everybody is on the same page.  Is it awareness?  Is it the mind?  A feeling, a cognition, life itself, an introspection or is it the same thing as the soul?  What is a soul by the way.  Pilot of a plane caught on fire reports to the tower "we are declaring emergency and there are 109 souls on board", is that it?

Some of my friends would borrow from psychology to describe what consciousness is, while most would sweep it under the neural science category.  I took a more pragmatic approach.  I learned that all living things is nothing more than a factory churning out products, utilizing raw materials and sending signals to regulate the different stations.  Life depends on energy exchange via the ATP cycle and nerve signals requiring action potentials to propagate. Hence we have specialized and differentiated cells to perform specific functions of  absorption, immunity, visual, auditory, olfactory, reproductive functions.  et cetera, et cetera.  To put it bluntly, in my humble opinion, we are nothing but the result of trillions of test tubes pouring each other with chemicals. These chemicals form the infrastructures of our body and allow ion exchange to form electrical signals.  Our sensory inputs perhaps elicit certain chemicals to be formed, i.e. dopamine, oxytocin, endorphin, and along with sensory signals form experiences that we perceive as real.  To me, consciousness is the manifestation of chemicals and electricity.  Whatever our consciousness conjures up, is just a summation of all of the above.  I wonder if someday we are advance enough to send these packets of chemicals and electrical charges from one individual to another, could we share consciousness?  Believing reality is real could be the biggest scam. Our dreams could be so vivid that we believe they are real, until we wake up that is.  Oh yes some people called dreams the subconscious.  So called "altered states" achieved by using drugs or biologicals (psilocybin for example) are just reactions to chemicals that disrupt our normal production and distribution of chemicals.   So when I die, my chemical reactions come to a screeching halt, and my "reality" ceases to exist (except that my hair and nail would continue to grow for a day or two, creepy, right?), whereas just a few moments before I take my last breath, it was still real to me.  So is consciousness merely a state of awareness, or does it also imply intelligence, reasoning, morality, ethics?  Does the size of our brains have anything remotely to do with consciousness?  Does an imbecile have less consciousness than a genius?  Does consciousness include the ability to plot and manipulate and backstab others?

An interesting segue regarding the role played by chemicals in our body is that according to the famous psychologist Jordon Peterson, aggressive lobsters posses a higher level of serotonin.  He also stipulated that serotonin endowed lobsters attain a higher status in the hierarchy of lobsters, and they strut a better body image i.e. more frequent raised claws.  Serotonin by the way is a chemical that carries signals between nerve cells and is responsible for mediating the moods of a person, so we believe.  A class of drugs called SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) of which Prozac is an example, works by propping up the level of serotonin in our bloodstream by delaying its metabolism back into the system.  

Seeing a person go through puberty, watching animals in heat or simply witnessing the a person high on drugs definitely offers a strong argument of how chemicals shape life.  Naysayers would say this is too simplistic.  Something as abstract as consciousness surely cannot be defined by chemical terms.  Well we are all aware that sunlight is made up of 7 colors.  So how easy is it to mix the 7 colors to form the white color.  I am not talking about painting the colors on a disc and spinning it to get the white color.  That's cheating because we are exploiting the latency in our optic system to mix the colors in our brain.  That latency is what fooled us into thinking the frames in a movie strip actually move smoothly.  We know we are watching a movie, yet we cry, we laugh, we swear.  Are we manufacturing our own reality?  Is this consciousness? 

It is impossible for us to mix the exact amount and intensity of the different colors to form a white color.  Truth of the matter is that white is not a color, it is simply a state when all light are reflected and our brain perceive that as white.  All "color" cause certain spectrum of light to be absorbed.  Thus whatever "color" we choose to mix will always absorb some light and a total reflection i.e. white could never be achieved.  Can the color white actually be not "real"?

The conversation naturally turned to whether afterlife exists. Whatever a person's religious belief, we all subscribe to the fact that all things decompose and breakdown when dead and all the ingredients of life are returned to earth.  And if mother earth is a miniscule grain of stardust in one of those 30 trillions of galaxies then are we not all children of this vast universe, and not just earth.  Unto dust thou shalt return has real secular meaning.  The enormity of our universe is beyond comprehension.  The Hubble telescope can see light from 10 billion years ago.  James Webb does even better, about 13.5 billion years ago.  In other words, someone from one of those far galaxies waved at us, and 13.5 billion years later, we see it.. It took light that long to traverse that distance.  If this is not mind boggling, I don't know what is.  

By this time, all the members in our nerd group had enlarged pupils, and our voices approaching the soprano tessitura.  We all became very animated, saliva spouting from zeal and interjections.  It was only natural to invoke the existence of other dimensions.  The Outer Limits anthology was non-fiction as far as we were concerned.   

When the topic of other dimensions were brought up, the String Theory took the limelight.  String Theory came about when particle physics wasn't able to adequately describe nuclear force, gravitational force.  Thus instead of particles we have strings that dance through space and depending on how they are vibrating, are able to confer mass and gravitational force by yielding different particles.  Mind you we are talking about subatomic structures, before the existence of atoms. String Theory and black holes often seem inseparable.  Anyways none of us in the group are physicists but the idea of the obscure "strings" is so "far out", to coin a sixties slang.  What is especially "far out" and tantalizing is the fact that the String Theory necessitates additional dimensions to function.  It's been suggested that there are 10, 11 dimensions.  For me, anything more than 4 dimensions (length, width, height and time) is beyond my comprehension by my feeble brain, yet that notion of other dimensions and multiverse is so "far out".

The Outer Limits lived on for another day.

I might be misrepresenting or conflating about topics that I am not an expert in, but the reason that I am geeking out is that I find the topic so mystical and inspirational that I want to do a painting about "strings".

I painted the "strings" using some cheap gold acrylic hobby paint.  I picked the roughest and stiffest brush I could find and I painted on gold speckled Xuan.  The native gold speckles on the paper helped to set the stage of my cosmic background.

With that, I randomly tapped on the paper.  Then I found the footprint of that brush to be a bit too big and not wriggly enough for my "strings".  I found a very skinny brush, one with just a few bristles and that worked out nicely.  The long thin bristles were flexible and twisted and turned freely facilitating a more string-like line.

In my mind this was the state just after the big bang. Matters as we know it hadn't been formed yet.  

We had "strings".  Through the interactions of the gravitational forces these strings impart, fingers nebulae began to form?  These fingers were depicted as void spaces in my painting.  I wrote them in using a regular round brush and my alum solution.  I was hoping the alum solution would act as a masking fluid such that brushstrokes done with alum solution would remain clear of subsequent colorings.  

In my mind, the strings would clump together like ripples and the resulting strands would propagate like fingers in a flames.  So I fashioned a bunch of ripples and flames.  The gold speckled Xuan took on the alum solution in a weird way.  The trek appeared black, in reality it was just how the paper looked when wet.

After the alum solution dried, they were no longer visible on the paper, only my gold color "strings" were visible.  My next step would be to reveal and expose my fingers nebulae.