BANISHING GOLD

Metamorphosis and the creative process. I had a notion to paint something different from the usual, as always. You never know where it might go when you step off a familiar path and deviate from previous patterns.

 

As often happens, the way becomes a convoluted detour through bog and tangled brambles, sniffing out where the forward path lies, or even encountering a vantage point to get a better picture, so to speak.

But after all, it’s just painting and no painting ever stopped a war, but just as with anything you invest a lot of energy in, painting is not always just a walk in the woods.

The original idea was to improvise a free-form experiment incorporating some familiar symbolic and universally archetypal shapes i’ve felt a resonance with most of my life and often explored. Basic shapes embedded in the human psyche, in use for perhaps millions of years to the present day and even appearing in crop circles.

Doodling as a way to gain access to the process and how to approach it so it would flow and transform, i got the message that this wasn’t the moment for it and some other experiment was appropriate. So wrote a page of reminders evolving out of another recent method.

Best described in concise language, i coated a canvas with thick layers of Gesso primer, carefully pressing tracing paper on to it. Then slowly peeling it off downwards. Clear acetate is more effective having more spring and suction as it’s released.

The result may be surprising, or it may not, as it involves what we call chance. As you may find, ‘in relief’ (pun intended and relevant) intricate organic forms of rocks and trees, or you may not.

If done mindfully you will at least have an overall raised network of organic texture which would otherwise be hard to reproduce. One in which you may recognize whatever you choose to discern as relevant images.

When it was thoroughly dry i tentatively shaded the surface with black oil pastel. In the same way you’d take a rubbing of a coin with pencil and thin paper. As it happened, there was a complete landscape with rocks and trees. I took a photo of a detail which shows this quite clearly.

Enhancing with black line the portions to emerge, and/or adding colour in the process. Throughout and for the most part i stayed with the pattern already there. Not adding or subtracting till it later became necessary to modify anomalies.

Hours of work, three distinct sessions approximately eight or more hours in duration. Simultaneously thinking about ‘the Golden Age’, and for years visualized and wondered how to paint it.

Having imagined such, looked at art depictions, and researched the Vedic ‘Yugas’, the long expanses of cyclic time through Iron, to Bronze, to Silver, and back to Gold. Eternally wondering why be born in the latter cusp of the Age of Kali, of iron, wars of destruction etc. Not yet returned to our full spiritual potential, yet paradoxically a period conducive to rapid individual spiritual growth.

Meanwhile the painting was beginning to look so much like an ancient embossed plaque that, somewhat out of artistic curiosity i made a spontaneous if rather bold move. I gave the whole thing a thin wash of gold.

While fully aware that the relief image could still be revealed, further hours of contemplation, attempts at manipulation, soon revealed this wasn’t such a wise move. Gold doesn’t sit well in a three dimensional landscape. It leaps out of context according to angle of vision. I considered various possibilities for a while but realized i had set myself a big problem.

Gold paint is very hard to obliterate. Even layers of matt varnish won’t do it. In other situations it did seem to neutralize the shine of metallic colour.

So i painted out the whole sky, as well as the forest, with white Gesso primer. When dry, mixed a new colour tone for the forest, and when that was dry, went over it with the black oil pastel to reveal the original network intact.

Laborious enough even to describe in plain language. A labour of love to revive, rescue, and return to the path. Metamorphosis indeed. Modifying piecemeal, touching out and banishing the last of the shiny bits.

Simultaneously enriching, enhancing, details in the mode of feeling. Typically returned five times in succession after packing away, brushes, paints, etc. thinking it was completed. Obsessive compulsion? Call it immersion, that’s what it takes. Don’t believe any of the negative terms ‘they’ continually invent for anything creative so you’ll buy their pills and give up altogether.

Whatever, and so much for gold. I resolved the equation, steered it back to the path set by chance. Returned colour range to a semblance of muted Celtic earth tones despite foreboding storm clouds in the Age of Kali.

Besides, i returned the land to the correct use of gold without domination, metaphorically of course. Learned how to proceed by going astray and finding a way. I’ll do something different next time. Despite its seeming roughness at first glance, the painting expresses a trace of where i went, to attain to A VANTAGE POINT, and that’s its title. Thirteen letters of course. ~

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Martin Rainbowmaker.