I remember a dream about underpainting.
It is a classical technique that requires heightened understanding of medium, of color value, of lighting; and the ability to predict the future, to see what’s not there and to know what could be.
It must have been right after I spent a couple of hours in Photoshop, rearranging layers and adjusting opacities and experimenting with blending modes and lighting effects. Those hundred thousand square pixels became imprinted in my vision but I couldn’t tear myself away. I hoped to achieve an appearance comprised of varying degrees of ishes—pinkish, roughish, sweetish. My eyes strained toward objectivity.
It’s no wonder my subjective conscious took it to sleep. In my dream, I faced the same quandries—how to intend without belying intention; how to see deeper into a flat surface; how to recall all that is underneath that top layer and understand the way it blends to create the image the eye sees at a glance.
And a few days later, in one of those moments when I’m convinced I’m either psychic or suffering a brain hemorrhage, I started reading Calvin Tomkins’ profile of American painter John Currin in The New Yorker. Tomkins writes at length about Currin’s Old Master technique and its contrast with his subject matter: skillfully rendered paintings inspired by pornography.
Currin is especially interested in underpainting and near the end of the article, which I finally finished yesterday, he demonstrates the technique for Tomkins. He adds a bruise to one of his girls’ legs. Then he sort of says, “See? So . . . that’s how it’s done,” and without an undo button on which to click, he cleans up the bruise. And then he explains that the girl’s legs will eventually be dressed in green stockings. It’s understood that Currin won’t add hosiery until the image of the bare leg is finished.
It’s obvious, once I think about it. He can’t just paint a green leg.
The profile proposes that John Currin, the man, was restored, was set right, when he fell in love with his wife, artist Rachel Feinstein. And John Currin, the painter, was revived by underpainting. The technique was a breakthrough in his work. I am endeared to the image of the artist on his honeymoon in Venice, moving from painting to painting at The Galleria dell’Accademia to look for layers of underpainting beneath the surfaces.
And I will remember him for saying, “‘I came to the conclusion that there is no misery in art. All art is about saying yes, and all art is about its own making.'” While I don’t believe that there is no misery in love, if I can learn to believe that the latter are true, that love is about saying yes, then that might be what sets me right.
