This altered book is made from another of the calendars Bronwen Black gave me in about 2016. She used to be a paper rep. This calendar was about promoting paper manufacturers, but it’s in Italian. Very little of the original calendar remains, but you can see some of it here.
I went bonkers with Posca markers (my current favourite way to apply paint – no mess, no water, just a pen. And very little drying time). Dollar for dollar it’s probably poor compared to actual paint, of which i have a ton, but it’s so simple especially when travelling.
And of course I love how they look all lined up like a rainbow in my studio. I bought a heap more of these at officeworks in Mittagong for my week of Sturt (where I famously only go to Sturt to see Nicola’s stuff). On return from Sturt I discovered an online store with even more colours (the ones in plastic in the image below). So I’m the full bottle on Poscas for a while. i do remember that I have been using Posca gold markers for probably twenty years, but it was only with Sports Cars that I really got into them.
So the book. It’s a heap of images pulled from 5 volumes of Betty’s Book of Art encyclopedia. It’s a fabulous book. I raided all of the books and put the coloured images into my bag for Bowral. We stayed in a lovely little airbnb in Bowral where it was lovely and cool all week (in the early twenty degrees celsius mostly) while Sydney sweltered. I always take multiple ideas to work on for the week, and this one won.
I removed all of the pages, and worked on one side of the pages first, then the other sides. Finally I lined them up to see which ones would “go” together, as in look as if they formed a cohesive image, and then filled in the sides and even between the perforations to complete the picture.
The biggest challenge with this is getting the people at the same table as each other be of similar size, and then to remember to respect perspective, as in put the larger people at the front/bottom of the page and the smaller ones at the back/top of the page.
I began with images where people were already at tables, and mostly I broke them up, either putting them at either end of the table, or sometimes creating two (or 3 in the case of some of the religious paintings) tables. Then I went with small groups and broke them up and seated them with the other people (if I can cover their legs with a table cloth it’s not always clear that they are standing. I still have some portraits of single people who were “too tall” to fit in, but managed to slip in a small version of a Modigliani and some Virgins and children, eating some fabulous food painted by Pierre Bonnard (this is the name I keep blanking on in the video).
It’s been great fun to kinda reverse engineer a jigsaw puzzle. I kinda wish I could name the origin of every image, and there’s way too much pre-20th century stuff I just don’t know – and since I promised myself after spending a holiday in Florence that I didn’t have to look at art pre 20th century if I didn’t want to (or see amateur Shakespeare, or finish a book, movie or show which wasn’t grabbing me), I’m not up to date with most of the images or painters in this book. If you want to go look and identify, please do!
When I reconstructed the book I forgot to put the plain black cover on. Since the whole thing is inside a large black folder it’s no big deal. I did add in the Parable of the Long Spoons, which i’ve known as a training story for years, with no understanding of the religious versions of it. I’ve been adding blue spoons into these long dinner party images since the first few (LC Turns Dinner for example). Now there’s a rationalisation for it, and it kinda works with the dinner party theme.
There are 3 videos below, the short one as a flyover, Then two longer ones where I talk a little about the technical issues and the different images and anything else.
