Glossing Over It: The Process of Glazing

When I first began to seriously work on painting, as an undergraduate art major, I preferred a thicker, more opaque application of paint. It was not that I was painting with such dimensional strokes as Vincent Van Gogh, but it was not in the style of some renaissance master, either. I still rather enjoy applying paint with a heavily loaded brush. It just feels good.

However, “art life” happens and styles change. In fact, style is more often dictated by concept than anything else within the fine art world. Take Pablo Picasso, for instance. Those only familiar with his more extreme forms of Cubist abstraction—and with little or no knowledge of what this master was trying to achieve—believe that he had no traditional skill. That is simply not the case. The work from the period when he was a very young artist reveals that he was every bit a master draftsman, yet he subverted that skill to challenge our assumptions of what a painting actually is. It is those endeavors in abstraction that set in motion the major shifts in much of the art of the twentieth century.

I, on the other hand, moved in the opposite direction. My painting style became more traditional as my work evolved. This was not because I necessarily improved as a painter—though that did happen, as well. It had more to do with a change in the materials I was using. Once I started painting over text, especially book pages, I needed a more transparent paint application if I wanted viewers to still be able to see the words. So I returned to the process of glazing.

Even before this shift in style happened within my own work I was teaching the process of glazing to my beginning painting students. I have them experiment with a variety of surfaces and paint applications so that they can get to know the materials and what seems to suit their own artistic needs. This particular method seems to test the patience of many students. I suppose part of it is that it is not an instantaneous process. It takes time. It requires an understanding of both color and materials.    

The paintings shown here were actually produced as an attempt to help solve that problem. They were painted outside the confines of any specific series on which I am currently working. They are slightly connected to my main body of work, but do not carry the same concerns or weight of concept. They came into existence because 1) I had these canvas panels laying around and wanted to finally put something on them after ten years, and 2) I wanted to show my students just how many layers of paint go into creating a realistic glazed painting.

The video below is a tutorial for my current and future students. I have posted it here because I feel that those who are unaware of the processes of creating paintings may be interested in seeing one process of how I develop a painting. I hope you find it interesting or useful.

I Come to the Garden Alone

Over the past two years I have grown more accustomed to sharing the stages of progress of my work. It remains somewhat difficult at times to let others see some of the more raw stages of certain pieces. There are times when the unfinished work simply doesn’t look that good. Still, I realize that for many non-artists a glimpse of how an artwork comes to be is quite interesting.


During the past few months I have slowly been working on a mural project for a Central Florida church. I have included a few images here of the early stages of the painting. There is also a short video that shows the preparation of the 6’ x 8’ panel on which I am creating the painting—quite a lengthy process itself. In Florida, it is far easier and more comfortable to produce a work of this size within air conditioning, out of the direct sunlight and humidity.


The church board asked me to consider producing this mural for a garden courtyard. There were not many parameters other than that. My concept for the image was inspired by the intended location of the work and the already established pictorial scheme of the church. There was previously no image of Christ in Gethsemane so this image fit quite well.

I also chose to paint over text, as I have been doing in my altarpiece series and several watercolor works. The text here, though much of it will be obscured, is taken from the Anglican Book of Prayer—the liturgy for the Eucharist. That communal event is foundational to the life of the Church. The image will be obvious from a distance, but the inquisitive viewer will also find nuances within the text when viewing it closely. The combination of word and image is also a direct reference to Jesus himself—the Word made flesh.

As with the oil on book pages works (the altarpieces), I have begun with an underpainting of dioxazine purple. That choice may seems strange to people. It is such a vibrant color. The purple does modify quite easily when subsequent layers of color glazes are placed over it. In these images there are passages where yellow has been applied over the purple. The complimentary nature of these colors changes the purple into a neutral brownish color, bringing out some of the more red hues the purple. On top of that, translucent white is slowly built to form the gowns. The text is more visible in certain areas than others. This begins to give an idea of how the painting will proceed.

While the imagery is somewhat different—more obviously narrative—from many other pieces that I typically produce, I have found the process of collaborating with a community of people an interesting challenge. I have to make the work pleasing to a group of people while keeping an artistic integrity for myself. This is my test for the success of the final piece. Keep checking back to see the progress.

Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville: The Full Weight of the Body

Rumors concerning the death of painting have perpetually surfaced for half a century now. Yet the pluralism of postmodernism has left sufficient room for this more ancient form of art to remain. That being said, the role of the realist figurative painter seems to shrink a little more each year. In Britain, however, which has tended to champion some of the most innovative and non-traditional artists for the better part of two decades, there remains an unbroken line of figurative painters.

This is not an endless chain of teachers and pupils who pass down a strictly academic style of paint application, technique, and style; rather, there remains a continual fascination with the human form and its attendant psychological trappings. The subject of psychology and matters of the mind naturally brings us to the grandson of Sigmund Freud—Lucian Freud. Freud, the painter, has been hailed by many as the most important contemporary figurative painter for the past few decades.

Psychological states are certainly integral to Freud’s canvases, but physicality is really the dominant feature. The painter’s style, which began in a more surrealist vein, progressed to a maturity based on the physical qualities of the paint itself. By the 1980s the paint was not just a tool employed to present a facsimile of a human form on canvas. The encrustations of the medium and pigment on the canvas surface took on a substantial physicality of their own which bore the fullness of human presence.

The broad view of Freud’s work suggests an interest in humanity’s complexity and dignity. Again, as the work matured, the scenes depicted became less like staged theatrical productions—less like historical or mythological scenes of the past—and more like the focused gaze of an artist within his studio. Aside from strict portraits (most notably his 2001 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II), the bulk of Freud’s paintings are quite obviously models posed within the arena of the artist’s studio.

By stripping away the props and accoutrements of some fictional, staged scene—and often the model’s clothing—Freud directs our focus on the person or persons as he views them. These are typically friends and family members. The artist feels a need to know his models. The result is that his familiarity produces such a high level of vulnerability (on the model’s part) and scrutiny (on the artist’s part) that we are drawn past the magnificent surfaces into the hidden psychological aspects below. This forms a grafting of the physical with the psychological.

Freud’s work is often linked to the confident corporeality of his subjects. Rotund figures with excessive mounds of flesh have become a trademark. At times these figures seem little more than an exercise in the mastery of materials. The protuberances of paint are a stand-in for the folds of flesh, though a mere masterful bravado is seldom the end. The starkness of these immense figures within the limits of the studio space provides a glimpse beyond their sheer fleshiness and beyond that sole trait that we most often associate with an obese figure—the immensity of his or her physical body.

One of Freud’s most notoriously fleshy works—Benefits Supervisor Sleeping—sold at auction from Christie’s in New York in 2008 for $33.64 million.The estimated selling price would have made it the highest selling work by a living artist at that time. Yet all the publicity aside, this painting brings several signature elements of Freud’s work into alignment. The fleshiness and encrusted paint surface are coupled with the placement of the figure inside a studio setting, in a pose that heightens the sense of her physical weight with psychological heft. Still, the work is steeped in the tradition of the male gaze and the complicated heritage that that implies after the introduction of feminist theories.

Fellow Brit Jenny Saville approaches the figure with the sensibilities of a younger generation. She keeps one foot firmly planted in the figurative tradition that includes both Freud and Francis Bacon, but she is also ranked among the YBAs (Young British Artists) who rose to prominence in the mid-1990s. Her contemporaries are artists like Damien Hirst. Both artists were included in the infamous Sensation exhibition that induced cultural tremors when displayed at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Saville’s work may seem conservative in comparison to Hirst’s, but something more than a cursory glance reveals shared traits with the other YBAs.

Saville’s images are typically viewed through the lens of feminism, but that is too narrow a construction. The paintings that exhibit lines and shapes drawn onto the naked skin of fleshy females (Plan) imply the pre-surgical markings of a plastic surgeon. The artist actually observed plastic surgeries in the year after her art school studies. While there are connections to body image and the pressures placed on women in contemporary cultures—worldwide and not just in the West—the work is more expansive than that.

Saville’s figures do not merely exhibit a density of flesh, they often allude to severe physical traumas. The figures are wounded at times, yet the viewer is uncertain whether these are self-imposed traumas or the results of living in a tragic, broken world. Hybrid (1997) seems like a patchwork quilt of skin—a body mismatched to its ill-fitting parts. And this idea of not necessarily feeling at one with the body is a recurring theme in Saville’s work.

The displacement is most noticeable in the works of transvestites and transsexuals. There remains a uniquely female gaze, even in these works. To take these specific paintings on their own, divorced from Saville’s entire oeuvre, is to misread them. Saville is not simply concerned with issues of gender identity, nor even the finer points of feminism. Her work rings truer when linked to the universal theme of self identity.

Like Freud, Saville is exploring the linkage of body and soul. The physical weight sensed in a representational style and the inflictions enacted on Saville’s figures both allude to the woundings of the psyche and the immensity of existential crises in modern and contemporary human beings.

The adoption of the figure as the primary image in periods following the rise to prominence of abstraction and non-objectivity can be risky. It has sometimes been aligned with a non-progressive traditionalism that has been touted as irrelevant. The Greenbergian criticisms that still echo through contemporary art criticism favor elements of the chaotic and performative. And while analysis of art in these terms has trickled down to our larger culture in diluted forms like "reality television," it only subtly impacts the thinking of the average person. That is a primary reason why the figure has not disappeared in contemporary art. Its presence acts as a necessary ligament connecting the ordinary person to his or her place in the wider world.

In viewing the paintings of Freud and Saville we are each confronted with more than naked humanity. Ultra-physical bodies resonate with our own primal needs to uncover the complexity of being—physically and spiritually—and the implications that hold sway over our every day existence. This is why figurative work will never go out of fashion; our figure-to-figure relationship with artwork is a basic and necessary human experience.

Andrew Wyeth: Farewell to a Pariah

On Friday, January 16, the world bid farewell to one of the most popular American artists of the twentieth century—Andrew Wyeth. Many people would be hard pressed to name off more than a few Modern artists (I am using a narrow definition of Modern Art here, in which many concede that it was initiated with the creation of Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles D’Avignon). Aside from Picasso—and people would simply associate him with some vague notion of abstraction much more than any specific images or the concept of Cubism—the general population is often at a loss when it comes to Modernism. Yet there remain two mid-century American paintings that are easily recognized by the masses. Grant Wood’s American Gothic is one and Wyeth’s Christina’s World is the other.

But familiarity breeds contempt. Such is the case with Mr. Wyeth. His realism flew in the face of the Modernist movements that were desperately seeking validation and acceptance within the American art establishment of the mid-twentieth century. Modernism had moved past representation and that, after all, was Wyeth’s chosen style. He was to some another version of his father, N.C. Wyeth—merely an illustrator.

It is almost unimaginable that Wyeth’s widely recognized image, Christina’s World, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). MOMA is the great white cube; the quintessential home for elite art. It stands for the epitome of high art and is the repository of the iconic images of the twentieth century. Granted, when the museum acquired the work, Surrealism was just making inroads to the U.S. and Abstract Expressionism’s New York School was not yet the loose grouping of tendencies and persons that it would eventually become. Today, MOMA is nearly embarrassed to own the work, yet it is one of only a small number of pieces—Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory is another—that the majority of visitors readily recognize and want to see on their tour of the galleries.

This iconic status is somewhat of a black-eye for the art establishment. One would be ridiculed in certain circles for having any affection for Wyeth’s work. It is seen as a sign of an undeveloped aesthetic sensibility. It might even be consider facile, sentimental, or nostalgic.

The artist is difficult to place within the timeline of Modern Art History and is summarily deleted from many art history texts. His work isn’t even placed alongside Regionalist artists such as Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. And so he floats around as a recognized figure, both praised and dismissed.

Wyeth’s own behavior in the art world has damaged his reputation within that sphere, to be fair. We may never know exactly what happened during the Helga Hullabaloo of the 1980s. When the nearly 250 works—many of them nude—representing Wyeth’s neighbor Helga Testorf were exhibited, there were rumors of an affair between artist and model. This only added to the hype generated from the sale of the entire suite of paintings and drawings to a single collector for the amount of $6 million. The collector later sold the works for over $40 million, total. The affair may or may not have taken place, and Wyeth’s wife may or may not have known, but the Wyeth’s did gain both a substantial income and increased notoriety at the time.

Aside from all this, why is Wyeth’s realism so appalling to the contemporary critics? I expect we will never know for certain. No one can bring serious accusation against his technique. At a time when practically no American artist used the early renaissance medium of egg tempera (though Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and George Tooker soon took it on within their own particular form of Magic Realism), Wyeth was creating some of his best known works with the archaic medium. Dry brush, another obscure technique utilizing watercolor, was Wyeth’s other medium of choice. Among his contemporaries Wyeth had no equal when it came to his facility with these mediums.

My hunch is that Wyeth’s subject matter is equally as problematic as his realism for some of his critics. His landscapes and portraits lack obvious evidence of critical theory and exploration of newer modes of art making. But this is on a first glance. The images seem familiar but these are not simple portraits and they are not typically commissioned portraits. Wyeth chose his subjects, not the other way around. The landscapes and figures epitomized the artist’s keen sense of the laborious life of the common person. His paintings are peopled with characters that, like their ancestors, struggled for generations to sustain life on unforgiving plots of land. That conflict is reflected in their eyes and written on their faces. In that reflection the average viewer sees herself.

While the specific struggles of these figures may not be those of the average Manhattanite, let alone the contemporary art historian, the basic strains of life remain the same. It may come down to class conflict. The critics believing that the unenlightened masses can enjoy nothing but simple representational art, while their own sensibilities have far surpassed that lowest common denominator. That would truly be unfair. Enjoying and appreciating certain Modern and contemporary works may be contingent upon the viewer being educated in the contemporary idiom, but it does not mean that traditional formats and techniques are inferior.

New art does not negate the significance of work from the past. There is no set number of masterpieces that requires one work to lose that distinction if a new work is conferred with the title. And the pluralism of the 60s, 70s, and 80s actually gave rise to sub-movements like Photorealism. If these works could be honestly assessed by art critics why could Wyeth not receive the same treatment?

I think all can agree that we have, at the very least, lost a master craftsman. Perhaps one day Wyeth will be re-evaluated in a more favorable way. For now, I will be one of those who claims that Andrew Wyeth and Damien Hirst actually have sought to answer (or at least ask) some of the same looming questions of life with their work. There is room for both at the table, if we only allow them.

“And why are those people naked…?”

There is one question that invariably arises when people view my artwork. “Just why are all the people naked?” Nude is the correct term, but that is not something to quibble over for the time being. There are several answers to the question and I will address each of them in turn, but I need to lay out a bit of my background before I do that.

The vocation of artist was not something that one would have foreseen in my future early on. I grew up in a small village—not even large enough to be designated a town—in Michigan. It is quite rural and many of my friends and classmates actually lived on farms. A large percentage of my family were and are teachers. And while most in my family are musically inclined, any artistic leanings never led toward any formal training or professions within the creative sector.

Academically, I was a fairly exceptional student which provided many options for a career path. It was not until I entered high school that it became obvious to me that what I truly enjoyed most was creating artwork. At that time, like many artistically talented kids, my main goal was producing realistic drawings and paintings, often of animals and wildlife. What can I say? I grew up pretty close to the earth and my family and friends certainly appreciated that style. Much to my dismay, several of those old paintings still adorn the homes of my family members.

Once I began my formal art education in college the trajectory of my work soon took shape. I had an equal interest in art history and was drawn to figurative painters, in particular. I honestly didn’t start out planning to produce mostly nude figures, but in order to understand the human body, even clothed, one needs to know its structure without clothing. When I began to produce work with nude figures, even from the first, it made me somewhat of a maverick. Since I come from a very conservative evangelical/fundamentalist protestant background, and the undergraduate institutions I attended share a similar heritage, the work wasn’t deemed as the most appropriate. It continued to cause problems in those settings as time went on.

Fast forwarding to the work of the past decade, I am able to explain the use of the nude in more depth. On the most basic level I am following in the long tradition of figurative artists going back to the Greeks. Modern and contemporary artists who have had a profound impact on me are Leonard Baskin, Lucian Freud, Kathe Kollwitz, and Odd Nerdrum. Surveying the work of these artists one can easily see that I am often drawn to more psychological and sublime portrayals of the human form. The figure is an equal element with color, value, shape, and line inside the composition.

The next, more generalized reason for employing the nude figure, is connected to my use of text along with imagery in my work. I am exploring an incarnational view in which the person of Jesus is at once the Word of God, but also the physical manifestation of God on earth. The Word and Image of God, equally. As my friend Ed Knippers often states, if Jesus truly came in full, physical, human form, as a Jewish man, then he came anatomically correct. This doesn’t mean that I am glorifying his sexuality, but neglecting or subverting it is equally dangerous. It amounts to a modern day Gnosticism. This is actually one of the most shocking premises of Christianity and it continues to be a difficult element of the faith.

Conservative American Christianity is often more than uncomfortable with the body and sexuality. Again, this leads to a renewed Gnosticism. While there is plenty of pronouncement against adultery, fornication, and homosexuality, there has been far too little time given to discussing human sexuality in the most basic sense. The fear that talking about sexuality openly and frankly, because it might be an encouragement to young people to experiment sexually, has led to neglecting to talk about it much at all. That lack of discussion has probably, inadvertently, led to more than one teenage pregnancy. What I am getting at by using these nude figures is confronting this basic fact of human sexuality as part of the fullness of our humanity.

I would add that this is not relegated solely to conservative forms of American Christianity but is symptomatic of American culture in general. The Puritan roots of American culture have somehow led to us overly sexualizing the physical body so that any hints of the body in our culture connect it to sexual themes or concepts. So, even the average America, Christian or not, is apt to find nudity in art as vaguely or explicitly erotic or perverse.

The final, specific use of the nude in my work is related to the nude figures portrayed in the altarpieces. In this instance the nudity is used as a leveling agent. Again, my protestant background comes into play here. These “personal saints” are every day, common people, not necessarily those canonized by the Holy Roman Church. I have chosen to portray them as saints, venerating them for living exemplary lives in one way or another. They are ordinary people placed on a pedestal for others to consider. Saints are living all around us. As I elevate them I also bring them back down to the level of each of us. They are equally as human as you and me.

I know that producing work with nude figures is ensuring that some people will find it not to be child-friendly, or even cause them to label it as obscene. It also limits those who will be willing to purchase it. That is the risk that I take. I find that being true to what the work is calling me to do is ultimately more important. If the work is not honest in that sense it will eventually be evident to the viewer.

Job: Questions about Loss

This drawing is one of several from a series reflecting on the Old Testament figure of Job. Eventually all the images will become watercolors on book pages. Traditional watercolor is a transparent medium, so it is very difficult to cover underlying images with it. When I paint with watercolor on book pages I also mix in a bit of white casein paint. Casein is milk based (though I’m still not exactly sure how that works) and is mixable and thinable with water. My use of casein with watercolor goes back to my freshman year of college when a visiting artist showed us his method of using the white paint with watercolor. I ended up using it because, when thinned with water, the casein becomes translucent and produces a fleshiness that simply can’t be achieved with watercolor alone.

All of the figures from the series are on pages from the Book of Job from a Hebrew Bible from the late 1800s. Painting directly on these pages is strictly prohibited by Orthodox Jewish law, so I’m sure there is a certain segment of the population that it will offend, though that is not my intent. In fact, it took me some time to reconcile myself to tearing pages out of a holy book so that I could drawn and paint on them. My Protestant upbringing, which highly values the Word of God above most other things, didn’t quite prepare me for doing this. When I first started considering employing this process in the late 1990s I questioned a friend who had been using Bible pages in his own art work for several years. He said that the first Bible he used had been brought to him by a student who found it in a mud puddle. Since the book was unusable for its original purpose at that point he figured he might as well do something productive with it.

That freed me up to begin incorporating book pages in my work. This particular Hebrew Bible I found at a used bookstore that I frequented in Idaho. It was laying in a box of books that had not yet been processed. It had no cover and was already disintegrating. I asked the shop owner what the price was and he asked me how much I had on me. Sold! For five dollars. No one could ever read this book anymore. The pages were coming apart every time it was opened to a new section. I decided that painting on these pages gave this book a new life. It was resurrected, if you will.

All of my work incorporating text gets back to the concept of Jesus being called the Word of God—the Incarnate Word of God. Physical presence and being, or an image, are placed in connection with the very utterance of God. Part of what this means, as the Gospel of John states it, is that the Word of God—in the form of the Law given to Moses—is made complete by the physical incarnation of that Word in the person of Jesus. This is complicated, but I wrestle with the concept as I bring the Words and Images together in one form.

For the Job series I wanted to explore some ideas of loss, pain, and anguish. Though I started the series around 2003 it seems even more pertinent now. When the American economy is pushing people to their limits and thousands of people are losing their homes and jobs, what can we learn from this story? Job was literally stripped bare. All his possessions, his family, and even his health were taken from him. Nothing was left. When we are left completely alone we have to confront ourselves. All the noise, possessions, people, and busy-ness of life can distract us from the most basic things, causing us to lose our true identities. These are not the easiest things to ponder, but they are essential.