I had a clear idea of a theme I want to work with. One of the women who responded, I had already met. She would be perfect. The only reason why I never contacted her to pose is because I got shy. I was surprised and delighted when she responded to the call. I followed up with her and the photo shoot is going to happen. However.

What is interesting is the women who didn’t fit my idea.

The women who didn’t fit my idea force me to have another idea.

When I work with a model, the relationship is like director/actor, where the artist is the director and the model is the actor. I have found if I cleave too closely to a predefined idea, I can never get that from the model. I have to loosen up on the idea to let it breathe. The model will have something to contribute. The point is to come to a collaboration.

When I work with a model, I give them a character — and a costume helps. I may give them a setting, in which case I bring them or meet them there. Why do I do this? Because I am interested in what is going on in their minds. I am interested in their emotions. I want some sign of life. I don’t want them to go dead. And a story, particularly an open-ended story, gives them a place to come alive.

Some people work from life. That means they have to put their model into a pose they can hold for say, 20 minutes. You hold a pose for 20 minutes and the pose goes dead.

Then there’s the option of working from photographs. When you work with a model and a camera, they invariably slide directly into clichéd poses they absorbed from movies, TV, magazines, something in the media. It’s not them. It’s not honest. I’ve stopped trying to fight this. So I’m there with my camera, and I do photograph their canned poses, but what I’m looking for is the pose-between-the-poses, which is the split second in which they’re real and alive and thinking and feeling and vulnerable. Click.

When I search for a model, I literally just set up coffee dates and chat with them. I am looking for the energy they put out. I am looking for what they think about and what makes them tick. If they don’t click with an idea I already have, I leave it open: given their form and their vibe, what associations, what ideas come to mind?

Today I met with a woman who looks a lot younger and more innocent than she is. We talked about life, relationships, where she’s been and why, why she came here, her experiences back in the place she used to call home. We talked about how in the atelier art world right now, the pieces that win prizes tend to be paintings of cute children or passive women in pretty dresses, and how that is a taste that comes out of a place of comfort. We talked about how October 7 changed everything. And that conversation about October 7 reminded me of Alexander McQueen’s 2003 Oyster Dress.

What I love about this dress is that it tells a story of having started from a point of comfort and optimistic fantasy — the ball gown — then having gone through tremendous devastation, and that the person wearing the dress survived and is still beautiful. The dress is all ripped just as the soul is ripped and it can’t even be mended but it goes on in its own kind of broken beauty.

This dress is the starting point for the pieces that led to my Beyond series and are some of my best work, because the dress, the dirty face and the wrecked coiffure tell a story. And when I was talking with that new model, it occurred to me that there was still a lot of juice left in this idea and I had not exhausted it at all. I had hardly gotten going. Time to pick it back up.

For three years I have been wondering how to tell the story of what has happened to us, how we have been turned into pariahs for things we did not do, how the lies about us are everywhere, how because of the lies many of us have lost our livelihoods, our friends, sometimes our family, how the world has turned into people who “get” it and people who don’t, our lives are destroyed but we press on. In the latest debacle, poor Boy George who isn’t even Jewish and could have stayed safe just lost his career because he was incautious enough and mule-headed enough and noble enough to put out a song with the forbidden lyrics, “I stand with the Jews…. I just need to be human,” and he took his chorus from the cry of the hostages and the hostage families: “We will dance again.” The response was immediate and cutthroat.

So that’s what we’re dealing with. The trauma of it has choked me and I haven’t been able to figure out how to get this into a decent painting. Now I know.

I remember when Bob Dylan went through a dry spell, he got out of it by going back to the ancient folk songs that had originally inspired him.

Back when I was originally thinking about the Oyster Dress and the rest of McQueen’s 2003 Irere series, I was living in Maine and I had it in my head I would make a dress to measure for my model and then distress it. But she was flaky and I couldn’t rely on her to show up. Time passed and nothing was getting done so I bought a dress from Amazon and distressed it. This new model that I met today, she lives ten minutes away by foot. It will be months before my sewing machine arrives from the States but I can sew by hand. I ran the idea by her of working with her over and over in a dress made to measure and she was keen on it.

Well then.

When I get her measurements, I will start a dress made of fantasy and violation and perseverance.

I like to work with the same model over and over again because we get to know each other. There’s a story that when Dylan first met Patti Smith, he was in a trough in his career, and what impressed him about Smith was how well her band could follow her improvisations. The Patti Smith Group had worked with her for years, so she could just make up poetry on the spot while performing and they could follow without missing a beat. Not long thereafter, Dylan paired up with The Band. But the point remains, when you use a new model, you dance on the surface. You get to know each other, and you go deeper. And that’s when the work gets better.

So suddenly I have a direction and models for two ideas. Now I can work.

This morning I read a Facebook post — and for the life of me I can’t find it now — about a nun who took in refugee (mostly Jewish) children during WWII. She gave them new names and taught them skills that would keep them hidden and alive, placed them in Christian families and gave them spurious histories, all to keep them safe. What was most interesting about the story was that throughout her life, she repeated a whispered litany of names, families, things about the children, things about the family, that she used after the war to help reunite the families, over and over again. She whispered a long chant, as if she were keeping alive an oral tradition or telling the rosary. When the Germans got wind of her exploits hiding Jewish children, they came for her but found no incriminating evidence. Nothing was written down. It was all in her head. They imprisoned her, they tortured her, they got nothing. She was released after the war and continued reuniting families and kept track of the children she had placed.

It occurred to me that her whispers, her lists of people, how they’re associated and what they’re like, had amounted to a spell. It was a spell of memory, so that the truth would not be forgotten. When all around her was evil, this spell was the thread that would allow her to reconstruct the broken families when evil had been destroyed.

This sends me, of course, straight to Lord of the Rings and Gandalf vs. Sauron. It sends me to elves turned into hoards of orcs. It sends me to now.

It makes me think about how language and particularly memes are used today for spell casting. People encounter taqqiye, lies and omissions every time they look at a screen, every time they read a news article, every time they look at social media, at memes and comments posted by bots and by people who have become bots, and they are captured more securely than if they had been bound with chains. They have been hypnotized. Truth becomes untruth, and untruth becomes truth. These spells invert the world.

The attackers become the attacked. The powerful become the powerless. The oppressors become the oppressed. People don’t question, they recite. They have left their brains at the door. The images, the repetition, fill their minds. The world they depict is not reality, and it has not replaced reality, but in the minds of the spellbound it is the only reality.

The screen is the delivery method for what used to be called a binding spell, and these binding spells are spells of untruth.

In the Finnish Kalevala, all speech is considered a spell. Isn’t that interesting? In The Odyssey, when the Cyclops Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name, Odysseus tells him, “Nobody.” After Odysseus blinded him and Polyphemus called out to his father, Poseidon for revenge, all he could say was “Nobody blinded me.” That was a spell of untruth.

In qi gung, there is this notion that the life force, qi, can be manipulated and even thrown through breath and intention. When I first heard the concept I very much scoffed. And then I witnessed it happen many times and I even did it myself a few times, and then I believed. What we call “magic” are things we don’t understand yet. I have read that quantum explains many of the things that we call “magic.” Whether or not there is any truth to any of this, what remains is that focused intention is powerful.

Focused intention against you is powerful. When you look at a screen, focused intention against you is most of what you see. The only defense is a mind that knows itself, knows what truth is, and believes in it.

This morning I encountered a terrific essay on how to break a binding spell which set me off on this train of thought. It takes getting the spellbound to ask questions, which is a very difficult thing to do because they have many incentives not to think.

Another thing I encountered today is a spell misdirection, the kind of thing you’d be more likely to see in Harry Potter, but it’s a thing of beauty. The “Hypnosis” drone swarm defensive shield redirects a drone swarm away from their target. Essentially, Hypnosis concocts a spell of untruth, to be used to protect against a regime of untruth.

I am a painter. I look for the mythic reality under the apparent reality. I haven’t come to any conclusions yet but this is an interesting line of inquiry. In a few weeks a new friend will visit, and I will see if I can persuade her to pose. I wonder what her ideas would be on this.

The US has just surrendered to an almost-defeated Iran and called it a victory, leaving Israel, who fought valiantly and provided brilliant intelligence in this war, not only high and dry but in worse shape than before the US got involved: Hezbollah is allowed to bomb the north at will but Israel is not allowed to retaliate.

Because Israel is a dhimmi state and it needs to know its place.

I could wax poetic on how Trump only does things for his personal gain and is not in any way attached to causes, or how Witkoff was compromised even before he took office and the fact that he was compromised was the reason why he was chosen for the position, or how the Democrats screaming “Free Palestine” are really screaming “Hitler didn’t finish the job but we will!” but frankly there is so much you and I will never know about what happened it’s a waste of breath to debate this stuff. However, there is one thing we do know.

There’s an episode in the Tanakh, and I’ve only read through the whole Tanakh once so I can’t cite you exactly when and where it happened and I certainly don’t remember the details, but I think it was when Israel had to fight the Babylonians and they allied with Egypt and thought oh, Egypt is this big world power, we’ll be fine, but when the fight came the Egyptians were defeated. The lesson of this story, this piece of history, was that Israel can’t rely on foreign powers to defend it. And when Israel went in all buddy-buddy with Trump I thought of this story, because Trump only cares about Trump, and Trump Always Chickens Out and Trump has a Qatari meathook on a very short leash through his groin, and I thought well let’s see how this goes but hey, we’ve been warned. We were warned what was it, 2500 years ago? Shouldn’t we have gotten the memo?

I am in Israel where it’s hard to find anything that has to be imported because most of the world boycotts Israel. You want to buy something online? Maybe you can, maybe you can’t, my old yarn supplier in Massachusetts marks everything in the shop as an inventory of 0 when it sees you’re accessing the site from Israel. At least half the merchandise on Amazon and maybe 2/3 of the merchandise on Etsy refuse to sell to Israel, no matter how much exorbitant shipping you’re willing to pay. So there are shortages of everything here, and there are so few shipments of anything supplying the country that you can tell when a shipping container has arrived because suddenly after months all the stores have new stuff on their shelves.

When I first got here, I bought a used washing machine and the guy who does plumbing for my apartment came to hook it up. He’s not a plumber. He used to have some important job in hydroengineering, but now he’s old and he does plumbing work as a favor for his old buddy who’s the landlord. He needed a part to fix a leak, but he didn’t go out to get it. He had a wrinkled plastic shopping bag, like the kind you see stuck on trees, and in it was an assortment of used parts he had accumulated from here and there. With wrong-sized parts and a squirt of silicon caulking, he jerry-rigged my leak. When I watched him improvise, I thought, “This is the most Israeli thing I’ve ever seen.” And then the washer worked, without splashing water all over the floor. I was thinking, this is the reason there are so many Israeli inventions. An entire culture of workarounds and making do create a mindset that thinks out of the box, because they can’t have the box.

I recently did a tarot reading for myself. I’m not that good at it and I always do the Celtic cross, which doesn’t favor yes/no questions, you have to ask it something vague and then you get a whole analysis of the situation, what led to it, where it’s going and why. I don’t take the tarot too seriously but I do find thought-provoking outcomes. In this latest reading, I just asked, “How is it going to go?” and in the position for the Near Past, I drew the Seven of Swords.

Here’s Jessa Crispin’s description of the Seven of Swords:

A man is running from a town or a tent, carrying swords on his back. Some he has dropped or been forced to leave behind. The area toward which he is running is blank — an empty space.

It is unclear whether the man is carrying his own possessions or has stolen the swords from someone else. Either he is a thief trying to evade capture, or he is escaping from a terrible situation. He is leaving the safety of the city for a wild unknown. The blank space he is running toward means that he will have to construct a new world to live in, because he cannot return.

Well!

I left Maine with one suitcase of clothes and two suitcases of art supplies, leaving behind all my worldly possessions, including 40 years of the paintings that haven’t sold. That includes my best work and my crap. I left behind gorgeous handmade art furniture. I left behind a gazillion sweaters I knitted by hand, the complicated Norwegian, Scots and Irish fishermen’s sweaters I’ve been making my entire adult life to handle the cold New England winters, all in the best wool, museum quality. I left behind everything, without telling a soul where I was going, because we hadn’t sold the house and I didn’t want to take the chance someone might mess with it if they learned I was going to that pariah country where the media had told everyone people eat babies and rape people with dogs and murder innocent brown people for fun. I left like a thief in the night. Almost all that stuff I will lose. I can’t bring it over. I will go back for my very best paintings and I’ll bring them to Israel, where the rooms are small and I’ll have to store those paintings on the walls. I will come back and steal away my own things that I made with my own hands, and the rest will just be abandoned to fate.

The fact that the Seven of Swords has that dark side that everyone is going to see this leaving as proof that you’re a thief, yeah that’s really Jewish.

Leaving all my stuff is the most Jewish thing I’ve ever done. All those Mizrahi who were expelled from Iran, Iraq, Egypt, every fricking Muslim country that ethnically cleansed their Jews (which is all of them), those Jews left with their lives, and the state or their neighbors took their businesses and their possessions, thank you very much. It has happened in England, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Germany, every country that let Jews in and then cast them out, which is all of them. In every generation we’re hunted. In every generation we lose everything we slowly, painstakingly built up from nothing. Not by stealing. We are the people of the book. We study. We work hard. We innovate. We’re not hired so we start our own businesses. We’re not treated so we start our own hospitals. In every generation we start again, and we jerry-rig, because we can’t get what we need, so we make it ourselves. Not like thieves. The thieves are the ones who take what we built up just before or just after they get rid of us, the competition. And then they make up lies about us to justify themselves. You tell the lies enough they become truth, that’s pure Goebbels, and it’s happening again.

While I was gone, a bona fide Nazi has been elected the Democratic candidate for Maine’s senator. The horseshoe has long since closed and the circle is tightening.

Here in Israel, I don’t have to worry anymore about what is going to happen to American Jews. For months I considered it my personal responsibility to warn them they were in danger and get them to make Aliyah, and every day I went on Substack to make my points. Eventually I started to get upbraided by American Jews who didn’t want to hear they were in danger. They were comfortable. They told me I was a fool. They don’t want to hear. The mass Aliyah from the US I had expected, because I thought anyone looking at the news can see how bad things are, that mass Aliyah hasn’t happened and I don’t think it will happen. I think the people who can hide that they’re Jewish will assimilate away, and the people who can’t will be destroyed once again like sheep to slaughter, and it’s their choice to stay and let the dice fall where they may. The upside is that now you can get an affordable apartment in Tel Aviv.

ARE YOU PAINTING?????

I am a portrait painter. In order to paint, I have to feel a sense of longing for connection with my subject. Right now, I can’t paint, and that has been the state of things since 10/7/23. No face calls to me. On that day I lost my faith in humanity and with it my ability to do a really good painting. This has happened repeatedly over the course of my life, so I know it won’t be forever, but it’s tough to weather. I have to get to the other side before I can paint a face again.

In the meantime, there is the land. I can paint the land because at least the land shows the footprints of G-d. I can’t paint buildings but I can paint wilderness. Theoretically. I have a shitty landscape on the easel. Maybe I’ll be able to wrestle it into a state of brilliance but right now it doesn’t call me. What calls me is knitting.

I have all those sweaters back in Maine because when I am sad about the state of the world and the state of humanity and I have no answers and not even any possible hope to explore, I knit. I think of it as laying fallow. It is a kind of meditation, where I can let all the angry voices fade away, let the quiet sink in, and make something practical that will keep me warm in the winter.

The buildings in Haifa are concrete, cold as stone, like a Medieval castle. The “heating system” is the air conditioner, up by the ceiling, which means when you blast your heat in the winter your ceiling gets toasty and you by the cold tile floor are freezing your butt off at the ambient outside temperature somewhere in the 40s or 50s Fahrenheit. You huddle by a space heater but you really really need a good woolen sweater and maybe a shawl to boot, and you can’t find good woolen clothing in the shops, it’s all cheap synthetics, everyone freezing. This goes on for months.

I just finished my first round of Ulpan, which is government paid Hebrew language instruction, four hours a day three days a week plus significant homework. They put it in the morning which meant that for almost all the eight months I’ve been in this country, all my energy has gone to Ulpan and I had nothing left for painting. All of the Ulpan are taught by Russians so I have been learning Hebrew with a Russian accent. Terrific.

Finally my time is my own. My Hebrew is only good enough to slowly, excruciatingly slowly piece together sentences when I am out and about, conjugating and mis-conjugating verbs, adjectives, prepositions, pronouns, every sentence an exhausting labor, nothing internalized yet. I have given myself a few days off. After that I’ll dust off my notes from Citizens Café, which is online conversational Hebrew classes, get back up to speed, and start again with them, one hour a day, three days a week, and I don’t have to lose my mornings, which is when I have all my energy. It is when I paint.

Hopefully then I will be able to rally, wrestle that shitty landscape into sublime radiance. I’m knitting at night, but my mornings, now — finally now — I could paint if I can actually paint. My professional rhythms are obliterated from all those months of Ulpan, I will have to get them back slowly, grindingly, seeing how bad I can be when inspiration is not there.

Last Thursday I traveled to Tel Aviv to see the exhibition of paintings by a colleague, one of Israel’s best painters, in a gallery I hope to get my work into. When I first showed the gallerist my work last year, she was encouraging. Last time I visited, she was discouraging, she gave me a laundry list of reasons not to take me on. At my colleague’s exhibition, I saw only two of his small works had sold, not the best works, just the smallest and least expensive. The best works, which were very, very good, hadn’t sold. I understood why the gallerist had discouraged me from approaching her gallery. Even from this exhibition of one of the foremost Israeli painters, a guy who’s already in the history books, she won’t be able to pay her rent, she can’t possibly take on another artist.

After that visit, I gallivanted. I walked to three businesses to take care of things I couldn’t take care of in Haifa. All three businesses were closed. This is from the war. People get called back to the reserves over and over to fight. They spend so much time away that they lose their jobs, they lose their businesses, they lose their marriages, this is what it’s like in Israel right now. People aren’t buying paintings because money is short and people are scrambling just to keep going, and some don’t make it.

I used to say one’s resilience is like a basketball. That every time it hits the floor you leak a tiny bit of air. You keep hitting the floor and sooner or later there isn’t enough air left to bounce back. I’ve been here before. It’ll be OK. הכל יהיה בסדר. At the end of every dry spell, every spate of despair, there is a sudden tiny unforeseen change from without and that change changes everything. Suddenly you have an idea. Suddenly you can paint. Suddenly you are doing the best work of your life. This has happened to me several times. The troughs are hard. You just have to get to the other side.

Israel has been here before. If the vaunted US/Israel relationship is over, so be it, Israel has been on its own before and won wars without help against incredible odds. Will Israel keep going? Yeah I think so. We jerry-rig. We innovate. We do the impossible. We find a way.

The only other alternative is to curl up and die. And we’re not doing that anytime soon.

A sharp break in your life, where one day there was before and the next day there is after, takes a while to process. Who you are, what you think, what you value, where you go, suddenly these balls are up in the air. What you painted yesterday does not make sense to be what you paint today.

A decade ago when I moved from Boston to the mountains of Maine, the first thing I did was I painted the mountains. Not just because they were pretty, but because the land under people’s feet affects how they think.

I came upon this concept a dozen years ago, back when I was woo-woo, as alternative as alternative gets, and I was reading a book on crystals. It talked about how the geological nature of a region insinuates itself into the local mindset. I don’t remember if it was part of the text or something I imagined, but at the time I was thinking about the granite under northern New England, how it’s hard and unyielding, with weird enormous and immovable boulders dropped just about anywhere, and how the character of the culture in those places is stoic, no-nonsense and fatalistic. I don’t know if there’s anything to the theory that the rocks underfoot make the culture, but I have moved to another hilly area where the rocks are completely different — crumbling limestone that gives way and betrays your foothold on steep slopes — and it makes sense that if you want to really get a gut understanding of the people and its culture, you have to get to know the land.

When you come to understand a land through its bones — through its rocks — it’s like understanding a person or an animal through its skeleton. The material helps determine the form, the form determines the function, the function determines the mind.

You walk this land and it doesn’t feel like a land for humans. It feels like it was made for goats. Yet humans have been living here for thousands of years, if not tens of thousands. The coolest thing about the little range that goes by the name Mt. Carmel is that it’s pocked with caves. Everywhere. You go to Mt. Carmel National Park and if you look up you’ll see caves on every other hilltop. In New England there are almost no caves, but in the Mt. Carmel range you can really “get” the concept of “cave men.” You can really “get” how prophets and holy men hiding from the law took shelter in these crumbling limestone caves.

The surprising thing is how rough it is to access them. When I walked to the caves within the park, there were no trails. The only path was about 200 yards up and parallel to the road, cutting across from hill to hill, and obviously made by a tiny animal like a dik-dik or that local rodent thing that looks like a woodchuck, because the trail was only about six inches wide.

The hillside is covered with bushes that are covered by tiny thorns. If you fall against one of these bushes, the thorns will go deep in your skin and there is no getting them out with a splinter tweezer, you have to wait for your body to absorb them. And you will fall because there is leafy ground cover, and that ground cover hides all manner of scree. You simply cannot see where there is a stable place to put your foot.

This all feels very metaphoric to me, as a Jew in a place where thousands of years ago Jews fled. These are tiny caves and not-so-tiny caves but they’re not famous caves. They’re just places where you can get shelter from the rain. But to get that shelter you have to be savaged by thorns.

When I painted a lot of landscapes back in Maine, I hadn’t done any atelier training. I wasn’t thinking about form, I was thinking about pattern. In painting these hills, because I have learned a lot since those Maine landscapes, I am trying first to concentrate on the form, then on a sense of distance, which means I’d like some atmospheric perspective. These are old, old hills. I want you to feel time. The photos I took when I scrambled up the scree and got punctured by innumerable thorns, they were on a day when the light was even, when there was no atmospheric perspective, when most of the values were pretty even, when the paintings were kind of doomed before they were started. At the time, I felt that just finding a site worth painting in this country that is new to me was an accomplishment, because I don’t know my way around. I will be back at dawn, to catch shadows and blue mornings and the hopeful mood that comes for free with dawn light.

Why am I fascinated by the caves? Because this is a time when once again we’re all in danger. Because the caves connect me to the forefathers who were hunted and survived.

This is not where Elijah’s Cave is. Apparently that cave was made so fancy and built up that it looks on the inside like any normal synagogue now. I’m interested in the crummy caves that are pretty much in the same state they would have been in 3000 years ago. When some poor bugger got all scratched clambering up these hills trying to evade some soldier’s sword.

And I am fascinated by the hills because you can’t tell if where you are placing your foot is safe. There is always some plant hiding the scree that will give way beneath your feet. Climbing this hill is like the story of the Diaspora. You never know if you will find a reliable place to put down your foot. And you don’t know when the rocks are going to give out underneath you.

I’m part of the way through two landscapes right now. They don’t sing yet, but they’re getting there. To me, they’re just getting my toe wet. I haven’t painted landscapes seriously in almost a decade so I’m out of practice. It’s all a matter of finding good light, good locations, and putting in the time.

In Haifa, jasmine is in bloom. The streets are lined with trees cut into hedges, some of them jasmine, so as you walk about the city, here and there a lyrical sweetness insinuates itself into the sea air. You walk past and it’s gone, a little surprise that never got overpowering, never got cloying, just a flash of loveliness you encountered, appreciated, and passed. If you’d held your breath, you would have missed the whole thing.

That is what our lives are like now. You grab what is wonderful and enjoy it in the moment, and its ephemerality is part of its charm.

Who would have known that jasmine was a tree?

Theoretically the ceasefire is on. Last night for the first time in seven weeks I didn’t sleep in my clothes. Last night for the first time in seven weeks I didn’t sleep in my bra. There is quiet now, a chance to breathe, a chance to think, and an awareness that this breather could be over in a flash, but that’s OK, we’re glad to be able to breathe.

I stopped painting during the war. I was working on a landscape and then the sirens wailed and I put down my brush and did not take it up again. I simply couldn’t function with the interruptions and the inability to concentrate. Today I will paint again.

I had a conversation with my sister the other night, when I told her I couldn’t paint. She asked what I would do and I told her I was thinking of writing, I wanted to help the war effort. “Oh that’ll do a lot of good,” she scoffed. And then of course I couldn’t write. Today it’s quiet, I’m alone, and I awoke with the clarity to realize that what I do best is paint, what I have to offer is paintings that are beautiful, that give joy, that provoke wonder, that provoke thought; what I can do is contribute to the legacy of Israeli painting. So that there’s something to the country besides the fight to survive.

I used to have a boyfriend who ascribed to some theory of astrology (not Greek, some other kind) that said your life proceeds in a cycle of a certain number of years, and each iteration of the cycle has a particular theme. He said that my life went on an eight-year cycle.

I’m now 65. I’ve lived many lives, and if you want to impose that eight-year cycle onto my life you could find ways it fits. Every one of those lives tends to correspond to a physical move to a different location. Every time I move, I lose at least a year as an artist. It’s a reset. Either I can’t paint at all because what I had been doing before is irrelevant, or I push through and paint crap and get rattled seeing how bad I can be. I lose a year or two, but after that I do artwork better than I have ever done. It’s a pattern, it has happened every time. It is exactly like the growth of a tree. The first year you get a sense of the place and you lay down roots. The second year you start to leaf, you find what in the environment is nourishing. The third year, you blossom and put out a few tentative fruits, and then like a proper tree, by the fourth or fifth year you fruit in abundance. Because I’ve been through this pattern so many times, I am never worried when I go through dry spells. I know “dry” means everything has changed and to continue working with your old themes and approaches makes no sense and you have to get to the next plateau. And that next plateau also corresponds to your next league as an artist, it’s like a quantum jump. How you get there will eventually involve painting but before that it probably involves a lot of walking and thinking and a lot of reading and watching films.

I think a lot, every day, about what I was sent here to do, because I feel in my bones that I was sent. The order went out and with every fiber of my being I knew that not to follow it was unthinkable. Every day I listen to the universe, I wait for visions and I wait for orders, which is what I’ve always done. They say of artists that inspiration comes but it has to find you working, and to that I would say, but this is working. This is the work of the first year of a new cycle. Research, reading, looking and thought are the foundations of my work. I don’t just paint pretty pictures, I follow lines of reasoning, explorations, come to conclusions, raise questions, and investigate. In the meantime, I am painting the lay of the land to get a feel for these limestone hills and their cloak of thorns and boars and wildflowers. In the meantime, I am studying the language of the place where I’m living. Little by little I understand more the speech I hear on the streets. Little by little I can put together sentences and speak with people, although I have troubles understanding their answers. I still can’t read a book. It will come.

I don’t believe in coincidence. I believe G-d puts people and places together, winds them up and lets them go, they get to choose how to act but who they are sets the parameters. Every day, a thousand times a day, every one of us has the choice to pursue our best selves or to slack off and be our worst. I am still trying to contribute, still trying to find that best self, still trying to help others find their own best selves. That’s what my art is for. That is what I am for.

I’m superstitious about my name, I always have been. My mother thought she was naming me a Hebrew version of the name Sheila, and when I was young that was how it was pronounced. From the back seat of a car on a night ride just before I started kindergarten, I told my parents I hated the sound of my name and wanted to change it, and my mother suggested the same spelling with a different pronunciation, “Shell-ah”, and that is what I kept. When I was 15 and my grandfather died, I learned that since the 17th century our gravestones have said that we were direct descendants of Shelah haKadosh, a Kabbalist that none of us had ever heard of, whose name was really Isaiah Horowitz but who went by the acronym of the first letter of each of the titles of the three-volume tome for which he was famous. That “coincidence” unnerved me and it became very important to me to keep the spelling of my name so that it kept the Sh, L and H to maintain that connection. I spell my name שלה accordingly, partly because my Hebrew isn’t very good. A couple of years ago I learned that his name is spelled של"ה, where the " implies we’re looking at an acronym. של”ה is initials.

When I made Aliyah (moved to Israel) and arrived at the Misrad haKlita where you get registered for everything, the guy at the counter wanted to know how I spelled my name. When I mentioned my ancestor’s acronym, the guy made a face, probably because I’m not male and not haredi and for someone like me, carrying that name would be pretentious. It would be kind of like impersonating an officer. So I got the same kind of name butchering in Israel that Jews got in the US at when they first came to Ellis Island. For instance, at Ellis Island, my grandfather arrived as יושע — Joshua — and as an American he had to go as Sam because that’s what the official wrote down. At the Misrad haKlita, my surname got tweaked from the visually pretty but orally ambiguous הורוויץ (which can be Horvitz, Horovitz, Horowitz, Horwitz) to the visually ugly but orally unambiguous הורביץ, and that severed my tie to my ancestor. I kept my spelling, שלה, but unfortunately in Hebrew that means “hers”. So the government sends me letters addressed to Hers Horvitz.

It could be worse but I don’t want to go through life with the name of Hers.

It occurred to me lately that a slight change in spelling would change everything. In Hebrew, the letters ה and ח are very different; ה is a straightforward “h” while ח has no English equivalent; it is variously transliterated as “h”, “ḥ”, “ch” or “kh”, and its sound is something English speakers associate with clearing their throats. So the name Shelah written in the Latin alphabet could easily transliterate to שלח in Hebrew with no change. The stress would move to the second syllable and you’d end the name with a bit of throat-clearing, but here’s the kicker: what does שלח mean? It means “He sent.” Not “I was sent,” which would be נשלחתי, or “He sent me,” which would be שלח אותי, but just “He sent”. I haven’t changed it. I’m thinking about it. Is it pretentious? Should I remain “Hers”, which makes me feel like the embroidery on a towel?

I don’t know. I just know this is the beginning of a new phase. I’m working hard to figure out where it’s going to send me, oh dear there’s that word again and that was an accident.

But yeah, we get sent. Every one of us. We get put in certain places among certain people, wound up, and then let loose. In your life, you are going to have phases. Listen hard, not to me, but to the universe. It’s going to tell you where to go. You have to go there.

Put down your roots. Spread out your leaves. And blossom.

Every one of us was put on Earth with a job to do. We don’t tell the universe what our job is, we listen and it tells us.

The universe will send you to do something. Just listen so you can hear when it speaks.

Today I will go back to that landscape. It’s Mt. Carmel, which is in Haifa. If you go there and actually start to climb it, you’ll find that although from a distance it looks green and pretty, in real life it’s made of scree that makes footing difficult and it’s covered with bushes of innumerable tiny thorns that embed themselves in your skin like chiggers and you can’t get them out. Towards the top of the mountain is a line of caves, where the patriarchs hid when they were in trouble. Those patriarchs, did they really climb that mountain in sandals? Unprotected? With the thorns and the scree and the — yes they’re there — snakes? And wild boars the size of small bears? Wow. Elijah the Prophet lived in one of those caves. That’s hardcore.

Those caves call me.

I’m listening.

Here in Israel, the war continues, I’ve slept in my clothes for a month. We have occasional full days and nights without alarms but you never know what’s coming. The last time the alarm went off, the rockets were from Hezbollah, which means you have less than a minute from the alarm to get to the shelter, there’s the noisy alert sound on your phone but there’s also the air raid alarm in the air around you, a shriek straight out of World War II, and that’s what went off. We don’t have a mamad (shelter) in our building; we have to go around the corner to the heavily reinforced underground bunker that is the community miklat. As I tore down the stairs with our elderly dog and my husband stayed behind to lock up, I already heard explosions outside, lots of them. We tore into the street with booms all around us and ran to the miklat.

And as usual in the miklat, people were calm, they were jovial, nobody is particularly worried, because the miklat is a form of rescue. You’re down there with a bunch of people who don’t hate you and their kids and dogs and cats and you know that you’re OK.

I got a call last night from a friend who lives in a neighborhood a five-minute walk from the neighborhood called Nesher in Haifa. Nesher was hit by a cluster bomb (which is a war crime but the world doesn’t care about war crimes when Jews get hit) and part of that bomb flew off and took out part of my friend’s apartment building. My friend’s apartment is OK but this is just how it is, just another day in Israel. A psychopathic regime commits a war crime against us and the world is disappointed because not enough Jews got killed.

And still and all, we in Israel feel safer here than in the US. That sounds crazy until you look at the pogroms and massacres of history, even just the 20th century, and the long history of Jews getting killed in their beds by the neighbors with whom they had coffee the day before. It sounds crazy until you listen to the media and social media, which is now coming in with full-throated defense of the poor innocent IRGC. The same IRGC that has been screaming “Death to America!” alongside its “Death to Israel!” and “Death to the Jews!” for 40 years, even though it shares no border with Israel and was not at all threatened by Israel until it tried to wipe Israel off the map. The IRGC is the same regime that manipulated Iranian leftists to support it and once it came to power, it killed them all and instituted totalitarian, jihadist sharia law, the opposite of what the leftists wanted. The Iranian people have been hostages to this regime for two generations, and of course a couple of months ago when they rose up because they had no water or electricity because the IRGC had spent all their oil money on weapons to eradicate Israel, the IRGC gunned them down in the streets by the tens of thousands, and then combed the hospitals and killed survivors. These are not nice guys.

Suffice it to say, while those Iranian protesters were being massacred, there was radio silence about it in the media and on social media, because the Iranian protesters were begging Israel and the US to save them. They cannot be the good guys if the ones who are killing them also have spent the past 40 years trying to eradicate the planet’s Jews.

So while this is going on, I think about how conventional media and social media absolutely love these OCD nutcases, the IRGC, and how it is getting more dangerous by the day to have Jewish blood in the West. Most Jews I know back there deal with it by going into denial, they tell themselves and anyone who asks that they’re not really Jewish, they don’t practice, it’s not their fault, they know that Israel is the source of all evil because the NY Times and the BBC and the Guardian and all their favorite celebrities told them so, they just hope that if they betray themselves and their people enthusiastically enough the people around them who they used to think were their friends will continue to be their friends, continue to support them, continue to let them hang out with the cool kids who are now Nazis and proud of it.

The new trope is that Hitler wasn’t really a bad guy, it was Churchill, and that everything that has gone wrong in your life, every disappointment, that really comes down to the Jews because they run the world and have all the money, look, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which really should be required reading everywhere, it spells it all out. Your college professor, whose salary is paid for by a grant by the same Qatar who funds the Muslim Brotherhood and much of the US educational system and wants to instill a caliphate to take over the entire world, your professor gave you all your information, straight from the KGB, which is Russian and that’s how they know about the Protocols, a Russian forgery. The new trope says that if your life sucks, it wasn’t your fault, it was because of the evil Jews. You know the new trope is true because it sounds so much like old tropes. Both the new trope and the old trope are the best things that ever happened to you because they give you freedom from responsibility.

There is nothing more horrifying, and nothing that people have put more work and money and effort into evading for all of human history than personal responsibility.

Given how bold and proud the hatred of us is now, given that in the Diaspora, Jew hatred saturates the very air, what blows me away is that the Diaspora Jews are staying in the Diaspora.

I believe they really believe that if something bad were to physically happen to them, the police would protect them. The legal system would protect them. Some daddy somewhere is coming to protect them.

One thing I’ve always known, maybe because I’m Jewish, is that when you’re out there waiting to be rescued, rescue doesn’t come.

The Jewish community organizations are busy compiling lawsuits to document that antisemitism existed, you know, for the historical record. Millions or billions of dollars funneled into these organizations who have spent decades defending every group but the Jews, but which were ostensibly founded to defend Jews, this is what we have to represent us. Or the organizations ignore actual history and go with the KGB’s “Palestine” tropes that lie and say we stole their land, and they’re asking what will it take to appease our would-be murderers, how much do we have to give them to let us live? And the answer, after five times we’ve tried to give the “Palestinians” a state, after millions of Jewish dollars have funded organizations devoted to our extermination, is that nothing is enough but the death of every single Jew on the planet.

For at least 2000 years, the supercessionist religions Christianity and Islam defined themselves in relation to the Jews. What they didn’t like about themselves, their fears and shames, they projected onto the Jews and said this is what the Jew is, and we are the opposite. We are the vehicle by which the world absolves itself of the responsibility of getting its act together. We are the scapegoat. No one wants the scapegoat saved. The scapegoat is supposed to die when you push it off the cliff. It’s not supposed to pick itself up, trot back to the village, and charm the world with its resilient goaty pluck.

You can dream that the police will protect you, although by now the police is quite infected by the Protocols of Zion tropes that are everywhere in the general population, and more likely they will arrest you if you try to defend yourself from attack. You can dream that the legal system will protect you, although by now you’re dealing with a legal system that always makes an exception when Jews need to be defended, a legal system that finds absolutely nothing I mean nothing to be antisemitic because Jew hatred is justified, a legal system that requires a jury of your peers, and those peers think that you’re the cause of all their problems, because Jews.

In the meanwhile, you’re finding out your friends are not your friends, you’re becoming more and more isolated, you find that there are purity tests everywhere and they all require that you betray your ancestors and yourself. You start to keep to yourself because no place is safe. When will your prince come to break you out of your tower?

He’s not coming. I’ve known it all my life. No one is coming. You have to be the hero of your own story.

So I would like to say to the Diaspora: the shtetl wisdom that says to keep your head down, be invisible and wait it all out, that’s not going to work anymore. No one is coming to rescue you. Israel is the closest thing you have to rescue. It’s the only place on earth where you know for a fact that the person you just met doesn’t hate your guts for something you never did.

In the 1940s, the reason why the Nazi party was stopped in the US was because thugs and gangsters literally took them out. The next generation was more educated and effete and relied on the legal system, but the legal system increasingly finds reasons not to defend us. There are thug organizations today, like the reconstituted JDL and Betar, and they may keep the wolves at bay, but they’re probably not to your taste.

You probably call them terrorists. You would prefer to be killed by terrorists from the other side. Right now you say, “This is America, it’s safe here, what are you talking about?” and I say, “You’re not paying attention. You’re in a bubble that doesn’t give you the information you need.”

Curling up under your bed hoping someone will save you never works.

Come, make Aliyah, be in a place where you have allies.

Or stay and wait for someone to save you.

The title of this blog is Masses and Edges. I chose that title for its ambiguity. “Masses” can describe large visual shapes, but the term also has sociological implications. “Edges” are the interactions at the border between masses. At one point on an edge, things come into focus and get sharp, there is a clear distinction between this mass and the one beside it. At another point of the edge things blur out, and the border between one mass and the next becomes indistinguishable.

As in the Horseshoe Theory, where the extremes of one political ethos become indistinguishable from the extremes of the opposite political ethos.

In nature, interesting things happen at edges. On the border between wilderness and city, certain animals thrive — Eastern coyotes, sparrows, ravens — and they live off the detritus of man. On the border between forest and field, deer graze; they need the grassland like cattle but they also need to hide in the forest at the least danger. Edges are places full of life.

I was born into an ethnic group that constitutes 0.2% of the world’s population, yet is held responsible for all of the evil that takes place on the earth, and that role, as scapegoat, as the Evil against which everyone defines the Good, as the Disruptor of the Status Quo, that role was projected onto us and is foundational to both religions that sprang out of Judaism — Christianity and Islam. These two supercessionist religions/cultures define themselves by maligning us. We Jews are, by definition, the edge. We are the dividing line between West and East, between the Individual and the Group, between Democracy and Dictatorship. Interesting things happen at the edge. Wherever we go, we are not considered one of the group, part of the mass, so we have to be ten times better at whatever we do than our colleagues if we want to make a living wage. In any profession, we’re shut out, not hired, we have to start our own things, we starve if we’re only as good as the others, so we have to study harder, work harder, work smarter, just to get by. Which is why there are so many Jewish hospitals, because regular hospitals refused to treat Jews. Which is why there are so many great Jewish stores, legal firms, financial houses, fashion designers and tailors, they had to start their own companies because no one would hire them. The fact that we could never get away with mediocrity is why there are so many great Jewish physicians, writers, philosophers, musicians. Why there are so many Jewish Nobel Prize winners. Which sets us off more and makes us hated more. If we had just known our place and died when knocked down, that would have been OK, but we refuse to die, we keep springing up, like dandelions that push up through cracks in the pavement.

Dandelion greens clean your liver. They flush out your toxins. We’re like that.

If we have made such attempts at assimilation that it’s hard to tell us from those around us, once our place at the edge gets blurred, that sharp edge has to be reasserted, the people in whose midst we live have always defined themselves as not like Jews, so we get expelled or we get killed, anything to reassert that edge. That literally has been the pattern since Egypt. When you study Jewish history, the pattern reasserts itself with painful monotony in every generation, so for at least 2500 years we have been pissing off our neighbors by keeping our noses to the grindstone.

It’s the lies that get us killed. The libels. Blood drinking, children-killing, every culture projects its fears and the things they’re ashamed of on us, over and over it’s DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender). There’s an adage, “You tell me what you accuse the Jew of, and I’ll tell you what you’ve done.” All the blood libels from the Middle Ages have been once again dredged up, news stories are twisted in such a way that whenever someone tries to wipe us out, their violence is blamed on us. Lies and fabricated images are trafficked all day, every day, and the Final Solution is full on, it came on so fast we realize it never went away, it just went into its closet, and is now out with the joy and exuberance that can only come from allowing your hatred its pure honesty, from allowing who you truly are to shine.

We on the edge have been squeezed out of every profession, our kindergartens are shot up, all in the service of freeing “Palestine,” which by the way never existed and was dreamed up by the KGB in 1964 with a whole ahistorical past that also never happened. The love child of Stalinism, Nazism (via the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem) and the Islamic requirement to take over the world, “Palestinianism” is the justification of the spread of an evil Caliphate that has taken over Europe, Australia and Canada and is threatening the US.

As the world is going dark, we on the edge, we Jews, have an assignment to keep the lights on. As the world is becoming overwhelmed by a death cult, we Jews haven’t gotten with the program and are stupid enough to have chosen life because we are commanded to choose life, it’s what we do. Meanwhile, the world cheers for Intifada, which means to kill all the Infidels, that is, everyone who is not Muslim.

We warn you, we warn you, we warn you, but no one ever believes us, because they say “Jews lie.” The Muslims literally have a concept, “taqqiye,” that says it’s right and proper to lie to the Infidel if it will help you conquer them, and we have absolutely nothing like that, but you believe them.

I don’t just worry for the Jews. I worry for the Christians and the agnostics and the atheists too. They have no idea what’s coming for them, this horrible force of darkness barreling forward.

Whatever starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews.

I am here in Israel with my family, on the edge of the edge, ducking every few hours into bomb shelters while the world wishes Iran would just bomb us off the map and the world could happily just murder all its homosexuals and dissidents and retreat into its burqas. The world is rooting for the IRGC to win simply because the IRGC exists to kill Jews and anyone who wants the Jews dead can’t be bad.

That said, a blog about art technique can feel pretty trivial. I had threatened a few months back to explain to you about transparency vs opacity. Sargent called that business of using transparent pigments for shadows vs opaque pigments for lights “a trick,” meaning you can get your point across in paint whether you’re using opaques or transparents, meaning the technical issues aren’t the point, meaning the seeing is the point. Transparency vs opacity is a nice technical effect and using that technique is the basis of my own style, but I have more important things to talk about.

Everybody who’s been following me for art technique who’s been annoyed by the fact that I’ve talked about being Jewish, please leave. Almost none of you have paid anyhow, there is nothing to lose.

I am here in Israel with my family, with bombs falling from psychopathic regimes and the West cheering the psychopaths, repeating ad nauseum the lies and the lies and the lies and not bothering to investigate if the lies have any validity, and I daily think about what matters. What do I have to contribute. What do I worry about.

I worry about the Jews I left behind. I don’t worry about the bombs. I don’t worry about myself. I worry about the old people in my old shul in Maine, where the current Democratic gubernatorial candidate has a bona fide Nazi tattoo, and where Mandani started a chapter of SJP and propagandized young people in the area to “Globalize the Intifada” right in their backyard. I am here in Israel essentially as a refugee, having hunkered down in what I see as a world war against the 0.2% of the population that gets all the blame but is actually trying to save the West, and I ask myself how can I be of use. Pictures painted for interior decoration are not something of use. I want to help the Diaspora. I want to help those left behind.

Those on the edge who are now falling through the cracks.

Some of the people left behind stayed to fight for their country. They don’t want to see their country circle around the drain. A country that blames all its problems on the Jews is a country that is not asking how to fix their problems. A country that blames all its problems on the Jews is a country that is going down because it won’t fix its problems. It happened to ancient Egypt. To Babylonia. To Assyria. To Persia. To Greece. To Rome. To Inquisition Spain. To Inquisition Portugal. To Deuxième Empire France. To Nazi Germany. To Soviet Russia. To the Ottoman Empire. And now to most of Europe, Australia, Canada, and perhaps to the United States. We’re watching it happen again in real time, blow by blow, every day.

It has a lot to do with how for two generations, Qatari money has set the direction and content of academic discourse, and of course Qatar is the bankroller of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is hellbent on colonizing the West into an international Caliphate. It also has to do with Facebook/Instagram and Russian and Iranian troll farms bent on destabilizing the US. It also has to do with TikTok and Chinese efforts to destabilize the US. The Great Powers are fighting for hearts and minds, and they know from history that any country that blames its problems on its Jews is on its way out, which is why they insinuate the indoctrination that the Jews are behind all problems.

News flash: Qatari money dwarfs Jewish money by several orders of magnitude and have dictated that our educational system from college to kindergarten teaches Nazi-style indoctrination, and we haven’t even gotten yet to Saudi money. You guys who think Jews run the world have been duped.

My days are consumed by Ulpan, which are Hebrew language classes. It will be years before I’m fluent, if I ever get there. I’d like to be useful right now but between Ulpan and the triviality of easel painting, that’s not so useful. But I’m not just a trained painter. I’m also a trained writer. Every day I’m out there online trying to get the helpless in the Diaspora, the abandoned in the Diaspora, the clueless in the Diaspora, to do something to help themselves.

Come here where there’s an army and advanced missile defense systems to protect you, or if you must stay there in the Diaspora to stand your ground and defend your country from its own internal rot, band together and learn how to physically defend yourselves. And for G-d’s sake learn Jewish and Israeli history, so you have facts and answers to the outrageous lies. Because most people in the West and the Middle East now believe that the Russian forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is Gospel truth, so the police will not defend you, at best they will sweep up after you’re attacked and deny that there’s such a thing as “antisemitism” because the term “antisemitism” implies that Jews do not rule the world and “antisemitism” is an “Islamophobic” term anyway, because it’s unreasonable to be afraid of people who devote their lives to exterminating you.

You have to learn to shoot, you have to learn how to fight, and you have to learn to throw off the shtetl “wisdom” that says make yourself invisible, lay low, don’t fight, because with current surveillance technologies, that shtetl “wisdom” will no longer protect you. You have to learn to stop being passive. You have to learn to band together for mutual protection.

What matters? I am worried for the people I left behind who don’t even know they’re in mortal danger.

Getting an painting to glow is pretty easy but there are a few general principles you need to get under your belt. You’re probably foaming at the mouth to learn how to get a color to glow but I’m going to hold off that discussion until the next post, because you don’t need color to achieve a sense of radiance. You can do it with value alone.

Remember, value does all the work and color gets all the credit. So first let’s talk about value.

1. Composition

It is possible to create glow without any color at all. This is done with a combination of high contrast, strong shapes, and transitions.

Here’s an image with high contrast which has no glow. It’s an example of what not to do. It shows that high contrast alone won’t create a sense of radiance if you have a weak composition. This image has no large dark shapes and the articulation is jumpy. The eye is too busy, too distracted, taking into account all the high-contrast small shapes. If this were in color, no color wizardry would save it. It could be fluorescent and it still wouldn’t glow.

The image below by Frank Frazetta has no gradient transitions, yet it is filled with radiance. Let’s analyze why. The large size of the dark masses contrasts against the relatively small mass of the contour. The large masses, connected by contour lines, provide a strong composition. Squint and you’ll see that because of the large dark masses, the thinner contour lines of the flesh against the light background act not as dark masses but as transitions. They connect the dark masses and articulate the form but they’re not busy (unlike in the Schwartzenegger Conan above), so they don’t compete with the big masses. As a result, they don’t get in the way of the sense of light. Squint and you’ll see that the eye wants to sort of bleep over those lines and connect the background white with the flesh white.

Frazetta’s use of thick and thin lines here is actually quite sophisticated; you’ll see that at the corner of the left side of the chin, he left a gap for a lost edge between face and neck. Similarly, he left a gap for a lost edge between the second finger of the left hand and the background. He left a gap between the contour of the sword and the chest, implying light glinting on these surfaces. These gaps look casual and arbitrary but they are anything but, and they create great radiance and let in a sense of air. I wouldn’t say the Frazetta has glow. It has glare, which may be exactly what you want, depending on what you want your piece to convey. The Frazetta proves that you don’t need color to create a sense of radiance, and you don’t even need shading, you just need to be really good at composition and edges.

I got an email yesterday from someone at Art Against Antisemitism who asked me if I would submit something for a postcard show, an image of some hero who has done a lot for the Jewish people. Well having just made Aliyah, I’m living in an AirBnb and we haven’t moved into our apartment yet so I have nothing that could be confused with a studio and what we have packed, I don’t want to unpack until we move into our place. Still, it was not hard to dig up pencils and paper. Thinking of the Frazetta and his lost edges, I banged out this tiny 4”x6” drawing of Golda Meir:

For all the same reasons as the Frazetta, it has light and air and radiance, but it doesn’t have the massive darks. This is mostly because I’m working on smooth, thin paper that resists getting dark; if I had a studio right now I would shellac some 140 lb hot press watercolor paper, because that’s the best surface to draw on. The shellac adds tooth and grabs the pencil. You can manipulate the heavy watercolor paper to no end and because of the shellac, it will take your darks. This smooth thin paper that I used because I’m traveling, it doesn’t want to go dark. So instead of going full-on Frazetta, I remembered something Amaya Gurpide told me in a workshop once, which is that the luminosity in a drawing comes from the subtlety of its transitions.

Which brings me to this image by Jean Delville, the first image that came to my mind when I searched my memory for a drawing that glows. Squint and you’ll see it’s pretty much one big dark triangle with gradient transitions towards the light. Vignetted edges keep the eye from sliding off the right and left of the frame. The fact that the foreground is lightened from the dark darks implies that the illumination spills over past the shadowed figures, and the fact that the shadow extends (illogically) to the lower right leads the eye into the picture. The composition is so strong that it would be filled with light without the gradient transitions, but the transitions give it luminosity and a gentle sense of singing spirituality. The Frazetta is filled with glare, while the Delville is filled with glow.

Why did I spend this whole post talking about value when the person who made that social media post asked about color? Because without getting your values right, no amount of color sophistication will give you glow.

Next time, I’ll start talking about color. Color is a really big subject because part of it is color theory and part of it is what happens when the transparency/opacity issue gets involved, meaning when you start working with real paint. You can produce glow just if you know the theory, although if you also know how to handle the transparency or opacity of your pigments, that gives you that much more control. And yes, for technical things like this, you want control because when you’re painting you want to be thinking about what you want radiant and why, and you want the how to be so second-nature that you don’t get bogged down with technical things not doing what you wanted.

Until then, let’s summarize:

1. Shadow gives you your sense of light. You need contrast. It doesn’t have to be black vs. white but it has to be high contrast relative to the rest of the drawing, and those contrasts have to be in the form of large shapes. Small high-contrast shapes scream for attention and if everybody is screaming, nobody gets heard.

2. You need a good composition that balances, with strong notan (large shapes of light, large shapes of dark). You want to connect light shapes to light shapes and dark shapes to dark shapes whenever possible.

3. Between and within the large shapes, subtlety of transitions yields luminosity. Within the large shapes, keep value shifts minimal. Between a dark shape and a light shape, a sharp edge will command the eye, and value transitions between the light and the dark (a blurred edge) will release the eye. You don’t want all your edges sharp because it’s like shouting; if everything says “look here,” the eye finds nothing in particular interesting.

If you can make something glow just with value, you’re mostly there.

She starts with the premise that abstract art lacks archetypes, and that sets me off to the races, because I disagree with her.

Unlike Colleen, I come from the generation who went to school when representational art was verboten and we realistic artists had to make extraordinary efforts to understand the whys and wherefores of abstract art (while the abstractionists disparaged realistic art as the territory of the feeble-minded), so I’ve given this a lot of thought. Even without recognizable imagery, we make instinctive associations. Vertical implies a figure, a tree or a building. Horizontal implies land or an extent of water — a horizon. For instance, look at this Diebenkorn, above. It’s all rectangles but you’re going to see things in it. The blue might remind you of the light you saw on water, the ivory might remind you of a sand bar or maybe something completely different, but it will still tap into memories, even if you can’t pin down what you’re remembering. If you the abstract artist have elicited an emotion with abstract imagery, it is because you have still tapped into the subconscious, you have tapped into associations with shapes and juxtapositions or even light and shadow colors. You may think that with abstract art you have gotten away from archetypes but you haven’t.

Look at Rothko, the spaces between his shapes are all about personal relationships, they’re close or their distant, they’re sharp or they blur. Even with abstract art, you really can’t get away from the narrative, you really can’t get away from how we see the world in terms of the physical and the story.

Even in something like Pollock, we look at the marks and even though it’s an allover pattern, that sends us to how the marks were made, you can’t look at a Pollock without seeing the action, it brings us to the archetype of the archer, the archetype of the scribe, the archetype of the hero searching in a cave, the cave of his unconscious, the archetype of the hero facing his internal dragons. The archetype is there but it isn’t in the painting, it’s implied by the painting. The painting is essentially the footprints left when the Archetype has passed through. The Abstract Expressionists liked to think they had transcended the archetype but they hadn’t; they had just obfuscated their archetypes. They made the archetypes harder to read but they’re still there. They might as well have stopped pretending they were so fricking advanced that they had transcended the archetype. Without associations, without any tether at all to the real world, we have nothing with which to construct meaning or even emotions.

Even if you think of 1970s grid paintings, they tell a story of an artist who was following the rules laid out by the critics, rules that demanded precision and intellectual rigor and emotional suppression, and if the painting still managed to elicit emotions, it is because associations still slipped through, triggering memories that may be so vague that they can’t be articulated, but those memories had associated emotions, and the emotions were still elicited. So for instance, this Slavin might remind you of dappled light. Who knows what place you associate with that dappled light, and you probably don’t consciously remember yourself, but the arrangement that reminds you of light and shadow and color reminds you of a mood you had, somewhere, even if you can’t pin down where it was. But that mood is there, and who you were when you first had that association is there. That combination of who you were and where you were is the piece’s archetype, it may just be beyond words.

The story is *always* there, if you just know how to read it, at least the feeling of the story. The archetype is *always* there, if you can just see it. It’s just that with representational work, the archetype is more obvious.

A given archetype might give you a certain mood. An abstract piece that conveys that mood but which is completely beyond words will put you in the same place in your psyche as that archetype.

Because realistic work is built on top of abstraction, that same wordless mood you achieved in the piece’s foundational abstraction will come through regardless of the recognizable imagery. A representational piece does not need to be read consciously to have meaning, to stir an association with an archetype. The wordless associations can be deeper than the things depicted, they can be in the light, they can be in the space.

How does an artist work with an archetype? They may consciously start with that archetype and explore it. They may stumble on it while groping around in the process of making their painting. Either way, the archetype is there and they work with it and they work through it, even if they’re not aware they’re doing so.

If it comes from a genuine need on the part of the artist, the conscious or unconscious exploration of a given archetype or the combining of archetypes is way more interesting than the unsuccessful attempt to run away from using archetypes at all. Because the why is always the interesting part. Why this archetype, and why now, why does the zeitgeist demand it. What life problem are you trying to solve, even if you’re not aware you’re doing it? Especially if you’re not aware you’re doing it. Why is this archetype relevant? Why do you care? Why should your viewer care? Does this archetype come up over and over? Archetypes are fascinating because of these questions. The effort to avoid archetypes is pretty pathetic because it’s like trying to run away from the fact that you’re human and you think like a human, it’s like trying to be hard and dry and dead like a computer.

Of course, there are people who decide intellectually they’re going to work with an archetype because everyone else is doing it and they pick one that looks cool or that everyone else is trying and they paint its surface and that’s the end of it. They may come up with some cool visual gimmick but frankly what they’ve devised is a party trick and they’ll have to come up with another gimmick next week. This is not the way you do it. I don’t care if you’re an abstract painter or a realistic one, if you work with something, be it an archetype or a color or a shape or a medium, it has to be from a real need, it has to be the only tool for the job.

An archetype is just a tool. It is an instrument for digging. Your time, your zeitgeist, the conversation you and your follow artists have from work to work, and you and your weirdness and your faults and your brilliance are the soil in which the digging is done. If you dig with courage and honesty, you might do good work.

Whether you dig with one style or another, whether you’re an abstract artist or representational, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that your style reflects the way you think. What matters is that your approach is a natural extension of who you are. What matters is that you’re brave and you’re honest, and you’re skilled enough in your visual language to get across what you’re trying to say.

And then you might get somewhere.

Go dig.

We left the US right before the government shut down.

What side am I on? I am on no side. I see the world falling apart on all sides, a lot of blame going around, truth dead, lies everywhere, propaganda everywhere, and I know the same way I know that what goes up must come down, that the violence has scarcely started and that western civilization and its advances and its treasures are very much endangered.

The West is being conquered by jihad and for the most part it hasn’t even noticed.

When one civilization conquers another, particularly over the excuse of spreading a religion or an ideology, it forces a choice of conversion or death (or second-class pariah status in the kindest cases) to the conquered population. It steals all wealth, rewrites history, claims all advances for its own, and then it destroys whatever art it can find.

That’s how all the classical sculpture lost its noses, its arms, its penises, its anything a sledgehammer can knock off.

That is why, when you look at the achievements of most civilizations that conquered by violence, it looks like they achieved great things, and then they stagnated. What actually happened is that they had claimed for their own the achievements of the peoples they subjugated and then nothing new got created, because all the conquering culture knew how to do was kill.

My husband, dog and I are in Haifa now, surrounded by Russian and Ukrainian refugees. In the supermarket, women come up to me asking where things are. I don’t speak a word of Russian or Ukrainian but these women see my grandmothers in my face, they figure I’m one of them and I guess two generations ago I would have been, just another Jewish refugee from the Ukraine, only then in the US. Now I’m am immigrant like my grandmother, in yet another country, answering in my bad Hebrew that I don’t understand Ukrainian. Or Russian.

Our first night we stayed in an AirBnb in the Talpiot neighborhood near the shuk. Before the lights went out, I saw one cockroach emerge from the bathroom. It disappeared before I could go after it. I knew cockroaches like that in New York, a master race, wily enamored insect souls as big as your whole thumb, that outlasted the dinosaurs and that will outlast us.1 After dark, the room buzzed with a whole colony of flying three-inch cockroaches. When one landed next to me on my pillow, I jumped out of bed like a shot and we were in another AirBnb the next day. We spent a few nights in the neighborhood of Hadar (Ukrainian and Arab, artsy, crumbling and cool, but the dog was traumatized by the lack of a couch) and are now in the neighborhood of the German Colony (where they used to house the Holocaust refugees and now host Ukrainian refugees). There is litter everywhere, there has been litter everywhere in all these neighborhoods. My Norwegian husband says, “It’s the culture,” but I wonder, “Whose culture? Which culture?”

There is always someone to blame.

Hopefully we will find an apartment soon. The dog hasn’t had a walk on green grass since we left Maine, and I’d like to find her somewhere decent to walk for her sanity. Yesterday Olav and I had to leave her alone to open a joint bank account and when we returned, from down the street we could hear her barking and howling out of the deepest, loneliest, most home-sick recesses of her heart. We have taken her from everything she knew. We owe her.

We arrived in Israel just before Yom Kippur. I had no idea that the whole country shuts down for two weeks then, that it’s a big tourist thing, that people travel from all over the world to spend Yom Kippur and then Sukkot in Israel but they do. We landed at Ben Gurion, the Aliyah people handed us a sheaf of papers and told us we have all these government offices we have to square things away with immediately, but by the way, everything will be closed for two weeks. Hurry up and wait.

The people who tell you, oh everybody speaks English, you don’t need to know Hebrew, they’re lying. Everything is in Hebrew, Google Translate saves your life. The fact that I spent months studying Hebrew online before coming means I can function a little. All our time is spent trying to arrange for these appointments, there are obstacles to everything and obstacles to obstacles, but that is how it is when you’re an immigrant.

Why did I decide to leave the US? Because it was falling apart, and both left and right had decided that the blame belonged squarely with the Jews, who are the obstacle to all possible utopias. I had been a left-wing activist for something like 30 years and on 10/7/23 I learned that the left wing had blamed all the world’s problems on us Jews all along and I just didn’t realize it. Half the right wing also blames all the world’s problems on us, and both agree that the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion are gospel truth. I wanted to get out before words turned into action.

When he was still alive, my right-wing father said to me, “You know, Shel, you may be smart in school but you’re stupid.” He was talking about my political views. On 10/7/23 when the entire left wing denied that any atrocity had been committed against Israelis but the Israelis deserved their massacre and mass rapes even though neither had happened and although collective punishment is unthinkable for anyone else, “Death to Israel!” and “Death to the Jews!” will save the world, I realized my father had been right and that I had fought him my whole life because I was living in a fool’s paradise of naivety. As time went on and things got worse and worse worldwide, as Jews were excised from all professions and it became dangerous to be visibly Jewish on the street and it became obvious that there is a world war against us, as I delved into histories and researched both sides, I found out how right he had been all along.

I wish he were still alive so I could apologize. Sometimes you find things out too late.

My sister said, “How could you not know? I knew.” I said, “We were in different bubbles.”

On the street, Ukrainian woman asked Olav and me where we were from. I said the United States. Olav said Norway. She looked incredulously at Olav and said, “Why you come here? You should be in Norway, you should enjoy your life!” Frankly I had said that to him months ago. He doesn’t need to deal with my troubles. He can have a nice safe happy life as a nice safe Norwegian. I had warned him before we married that something like this might happen, but he married me anyway. He came with me to Israel anyway.

A strange thing about being here. In Maine, I became allergic to everything. My face became covered with open sores. Tests showed I was allergic to most foods, and of course I knew from childhood that I was allergic to all insect bites. I had the narrowest of diets. I couldn’t walk anywhere because we lived on a winding truck route with no curbs and even no place to walk in the dirt on the side of the road. My friend the ultramarathon runner who lives on a mountain, as he drove one afternoon straight down his mountain in his truck (to visit us), he got broadsided by a truck. Naturally he did a 50K the next day and wound up in a hospital, not realizing that the collision had given him brain damage. Living here, it was only a matter of time.

In western Maine where we lived, you’re stuck in the house during the six months of snow and then when it gets warm you’re stuck in the house because when you step out you’re swarmed by black flies and mosquitoes, maybe 40 at a time buzzing just around your head, trying to bite your eyes. Black flies rip a chunk out and leave venom that can make you muddle-headed and if you get enough bites you’ll get a fever. A Mainer classmate I met in college told me all the girls at home had “fat asses.” Living in Maine, I accumulated 30 lbs and understood why.

In Israel, I walk everywhere and it’s hot. There are mosquitoes but it’s just not a big deal. I’m losing weight. I’m eating all these foods I used to react to yet the sores on my face are almost gone. It’s amazing.

Between packing up the house in Maine and all the time spent trying to meet with the appropriate government offices here in Israel, I haven’t painted for what, two months? Three? I’ve lost track. Before I can paint again, I need to find a bottle of safflower oil. When you have to paint in your living space, when you don’t want to poison your loved ones (or yourself) with fumes from turpentine or the insidious fumes from odorless mineral spirits, you clean your brushes with safflower oil. The supermarkets, of course, only carry olive, canola, and (Ukrainian) sunflower oils. I believe Rembrandt cleaned his brushes in linseed oil. That would do, if I can just find a hardware store.

In the meantime, I have pencils, I have paper. I could draw, if I just had a moment of time. If I just had a moment of equanimity, a moment to daydream, a moment for the skin on my scalp to relax…

In the meantime, I have a piece in Spain. One of the most Jewish pieces I ever painted, “Shabbos,” which shows the Shekhina dancing on Friday evening as the veil thins between the world here and the world beyond, when it becomes obvious that the world here is as holy as the world beyond and frankly the world here is just an expression of the world beyond. “Shabbos” made it as a Finalist into the physical international Almenara competition in Córdoba, presumably because no one knew what the painting was about or how Jewish it is, or maybe they did know and didn’t hold it against the piece. This at a time when the Prime Minister of Spain publicly regrets that he lacked a nuclear bomb with which to bomb Israel. In November I will travel to Córdoba to bring “Shabbos” back to wherever I’m living in Haifa. I have a nice safe US passport but there’s an Aliyah stamp in it, a mark of Cain. After I think December 31, anytime I have to leave the country I’ll have to do it on an Israeli passport, the official stamp of pariah-dom, so with the exception of the US, there won’t be any more international travel, we Jews are held responsible for all the evil and hatred on earth, we are condemned every time we defend ourselves, everyone hates us, I am here in Israel, the ultimate shtetl, one bomb would wipe us out, and so it goes.

The model for “Shabbos” was a friend who actually said to me after I painted her that all evil on the face of the earth is due to the Jews. People really believe this, this shit is real.

“Shabbos” and its companion, “Beyond” have got me thinking. They are both paintings that have received the most accolades — “Beyond” won the gold medal at the New England Guild of Boston Artists in I think 2024, and “Shabbos” also was shown this year at the New Salem Museum of Art. When these paintings were exhibited at my 2022 solo Stone Sparrow exhibition in New York City, neither sold, and they were rejected from all the international competitions where I submitted them in 2023, but afterwards they found their way, or perhaps the zeitgeist changed to make room for them. They both were painted in an approach that I cobbled together from Will St. John, Jacques Louis David, and Abbott Handerson Thayer that emphasizes transparent pigments. Because transparents don’t let you change your mind, it’s a very demanding approach. I spent a few years afterwards looking for an approach that will allow me to change my mind, have a bit of latitude, spontaneity and less risk, but as soon as you incorporate opaques, things get heavy. The results I’ve achieved with my opaque experiments haven’t matched the results I got with transparents, and I’ve decided to go back to my methods and materials I used back in 2022, with which I seem to have done my best work.

Here is the palette I used on these two pieces:

• Cremnitz white (translucent)

• Transparent oxide yellow (M. Graham)

• Transparent oxide orange (M. Graham)

• Transparent oxide red (M. Graham)

• Transparent oxide brown (Rembrandt)

• Brown-pink (Sennelier)

• Asphaltum (Rembrandt)

• Alizarin crimson

• Cassel earth (semi-opaque, Rublev)

• Ivory black

• Prussian blue (semi-opaque, M. Graham)

These paintings were made with Kolinsky round brushes; if memory serves at the time I still had some Rosemary Series 33 but they stopped shipping them to the US so I moved to Escoda Optimo, a Spanish brand I actually prefer, even if the Prime Minister of Spain wishes I were vaporized.

I used Galkyd Lite for my medium and had a lot of troubles with it. The day you open a bottle of Galkyd Lite it behaves just fine, but on subsequent sessions it gets more and more sticky. You can see that when I applied it to the shadows in the back of the dress on “Beyond”, it congealed so quickly (within seconds) that I couldn’t smooth out the value. The patchiness was OK in that context but it was a result of my materials fighting me. I would prefer that if an area were patchy, it was because I wanted it that way.

I used goat hair mops to even out the value. They’re problematic. They shed like dogs, particularly when you’re using a sticky alkyd medium. The Taiwanese artist Lo Chan Peng suggested to me to use splinter (needle) tweezers to remove the hairs. This works sometimes; it also mars the surface of the paint sometimes. If your medium doesn’t dry so fast (e.g. if you're not using alkyds), you can fix what the tweezers messed up. If your medium is very lean, you might be able to brush the hairs away after the paint dries. Sometimes you can remove the hairs by waiting for it to dry and then carefully removing them with a #10 medical scalpel, coaxing off the hair from the side, but again, that can leave a mark. The whole issue of goat hair shedding is problematic and unresolved. Synthetic brushes don’t shed as much but they also don’t have the sensitivity of real hair, and their mark can be clumsy. Sometimes it’s best to just leave the hair in the paint.

A reminder: we know what kinds of brushes Vermeer used because the hairs were found in the paint. Artists have been living forever with brushes that shed. You want brushes that don’t shed, make them digital. I for one don’t want to be a digital painter.

Back in 2022, Will St. John was adding OMS (odorless mineral spirits) to thin down his Galkyd Lite and a few drops of stand oil to slow the drying time. This works somewhat but the OMS can degrade paint on a lower layer and pull it up on the brush, and while stand oil does slow the drying time, it’s also sticky so it’s not going to really help the problem of your goat hair mop shedding. You could use a few drops of regular linseed oil in with the alkyd because it’s not as sticky as stand oil, but of course with either you’ll have to be mindful of the fat-over-lean rule. Will is now using M. Graham’s Walnut Alkyd Medium. I used to use it before I started atelier study and I liked it. Walnut oil dries slower (and with less yellowing) than linseed oil so it might not be so difficult to work with when you’re trying to even out the value on a large passage. I had some I had bought a few years ago and I packed it before coming to Israel because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get it here (so many companies and countries boycott Israel it’s difficult to get much of anything here). You can get all things Gamblin here though, so Galkyd Lite is still an option for me. When I start painting again, I’ll try again with the M. Graham medium and see how that goes.

Today, October 7, the anniversary of the massacre on Israelis that the world celebrates, the anniversary of the day when I learned I had been living in a fool’s paradise for 30 years, is the first day of Sukkot. Mijal Bitton wrote a wonderful essay yesterday on how the Sukkah, the makeshift structure the Israelites lived in when traveling with Moses in the desert, a structure full of holes that doesn’t protect you from the rain, is emblematic of how we Jews have lack of safety so deep in our culture it starts at the beginning, and that we deal with it with family and by relying on each other, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

In this time, when we are in danger everywhere, I am joining my cousin and his family in a sukkah in his yard for a meal, which is what Jews do when they have yards and family. Today we are waiting to hear whether Hamas will agree to the Trump plan and whether Trump will cave to their demands so the whole tradition of massacre-the-Jews and then international condemnation for Jewish self defense, rinse and repeat, will continue ad infinitum. I am not optimistic. I don’t expect we Jews will ever be safe. Wherever we are, we live in a figurative sukkah, full of holes, the breath of the Shekhina passing from one end out the other.

Breath is life. Uncertainty is our only certainty. Your only certainty. We don’t like that, we want more control, we’ve been striving for more control forever, but we have no control. All of us, you who aren’t Jewish too, we all live in a place of perpetual uncertainty, we all live in a sukkah full of holes.

In this uncertainty that is our permanent place, with a God we cannot understand, which punishes us Jews every time we assimilate, a God that functions on a timeline we cannot fathom, that recognizes there can be no beginnings without endings, no life without death, we can only do our best and hope for the best. There are holes in Israel’s defenses, through which bombs occasionally pass. The government has made virtually no effort to explain Israel’s self-defense within world media and that PR war is abysmally lost. We all live in a kind of metaphorical sukkah every day, very incomplete defenses, full of holes, vulnerable and hoping for the best.

But then so do you.

It’s a bright sunny day in Haifa. The dog is asleep on the couch. All is right with the world, today.

When we’re settled, I will paint again, and even if I’m painting a plum, the painting will be about the holiness that is manifested in all things. Until then, good luck to you in your own land of uncertainty, wherever you are.

More to the point, in a similar situation, how would I cope?

A seminal memory from childhood: Dr. Teichmann was tall, sepulchral, grey, emaciated. He had a number on his forearm. He ran our Hebrew school. When he walked into the room, Death came with him. He showed us ten-year olds films of the skin lamps, the piles of bodies, the empty-eyed living skeletons peering from bunks. “This is your past,” he said, “And this is your future.”

What he didn’t tell us kids is that the Holocaust wasn’t a one-off. Each of us had a personal history of nameless family who had died in massacres like that, just not as efficient, going back every 50 years for at least 2000 years. In the Haggadah we read every Passover, it says we will be hunted and killed “in every generation”. That’s about right. Every one of us carries around a very heavy chain of murdered ancestors that goes back farther than the eye can see in the mists of Sheol, and these ancestors are loud and opinionated.

So when you’re ten and someone tells you this is what you were born into, you know it’s only a matter of time.

I spent my whole life running away from it. I was the most assimilated person in the world. My social media feed on 10/7/23 told me you can run but you can’t hide, it’s coming for you.

It’s not quite time yet. It will be in a few years. Less than five. This is the quiet before the storm, you don’t want to wait until the last minute, this is the time to go. I could go into the hows and whys. I could go into the history. I don’t want to but if you’re curious I’ll provide links to journalists and historians who are more credible on this subject than I am1. If you’re already railing “Baby killer!” then please, if you are subscribed, do us both a favor and unsubscribe. I do not write for people who spread lies and want me dead. Although you can hardly be blamed, the propaganda is everywhere you look, every day, blood libels and complete fabrications and omissions and half truths, insinuations and double standards in all the most respected media where people think they’re actually getting truth but in fact where they are only getting indoctrination. The world is gearing up to kill us off and not screw up this time, really finish the job, finally there is adequate technology and tracking, and virtually every other time we’ve been massacred it has been on account of outlandish lies so why should this time be any different.

Most people aren’t paying attention. I’m paying attention because my life depends on it. Every day the wolf gets a little closer to the door.

Some artists paint to understand paint. I paint to understand how to live. My paintings are fueled by visions, and my visions are fueled by my readings. A few months ago, I stopped having visions. This has a lot to do with the people around me. In 2022, I had my favorite model, L, over for a social call. L and I were friends and she had told me many times she loved me. She had always refused to take any money for posing because she felt our work together was sacred, so I paid her with a painting. I asked her what she was reading. She said, “The Book of Isaiah.” At the time I hadn’t read it yet. I said to her, “What did you learn from it?” She looked me square in the face and said, “That all evil on the face of the earth comes from the Jews.” If you read the Book of Isaiah, it says no such thing; frankly, The Book of Isaiah says that every time the Jews assimilate, G-d will mow them down, leaving only a remnant of a remnant to carry on. When my friend L told me that I was personally responsible for all the evil on the face of the earth, the light within me went off as if a switch had been thrown. I knew right then and there, I could never paint her again, and our friendship was over.

That sort of thing, where a close, old friendship dissolves in an instant because suddenly the person lets me know that although there may have been love, they also loathed me the whole time for my ethnicity — that has happened to me at least four times in the past few years. With the exception of my husband, all my dear old friends are gone. It means I never know if the person I’m talking with — or working with — secretly hates me.

I can’t function like this.

After L, I worked with a few different models but I always have the nagging question, does this person secretly hate me, and the trust I need to be able to paint the person — well after L I never really got it back.

So I spent the early part of this year working with stock photos, which is very much a less than optimal arrangement. As the news got worse and worse, I got to the point where I am having troubles painting a person at all. My trust in humanity has completely shattered.

I am a figurative painter. You can’t be a figurative painter who has lost faith in humanity.

Nights, I don’t sleep. I try to meditate, count my breaths, and can’t make it past two. I am not catastrophizing, not saying oh the neighbors will kill us in our beds (a very common thing in Jewish history), not saying, oh there will be camps (will they? I have no idea). It’s more a general feeling of dread. It makes it impossible to concentrate. It makes the properties of paint or the fine points of rendering form or the balance of a composition or edge work impossibly trivial subjects. I am not worrying because I am not worrying about anything specific. Something horrible is coming and I don’t know what it will be and the dread is driving me mad.

Last week I was flattened, incapacitated. I thought I had a virus. My husband figured it out — nervous exhaustion. Oh yeah, I used to get this way when I was an engineer, because it was a hopelessly hostile environment. Back then I used to compartmentalize, don’t think about it, perform. I was practical and level-headed, I performed and performed and performed and performed and suddenly would get weird medical problems. Out of nowhere I would collapse and not have the energy to continue. Oh yeah, when the stress is continual, when the stress goes on and on and on, when it continues in your sleep and never lets up, when it goes on year after year, this is how I get. The current weird medical symptom is I have an intermittent blind area in my left eye. I am absolutely sure it will resolve if I can just get rid of the stress.

But I can’t even meditate past two. I’ve tried two-hour hikes with the dog in the woods but I can’t do that when I’m flattened.

So, now I know how I would have been if I had been around in the 1930s. I would have researched. I would have tried to continue to be productive. And then I would have bottomed out.

In a month my husband and I are making Aliyah. It took over a year for me to get together all the documentation. There were so many hoops to pass through, so many obstacles and obstacles to obstacles but now (I think) we’re through them. The only possible obstacle is whether our dog’s vaccine record will be accepted and we think it will be but we’ll only find out at the airport.

My plan, when we settle into an apartment in Haifa, is to start small, with still lives. When I was in Israel in February, an enormous weight that I didn’t even know was there fell off my shoulders. It was the chains of my ancestors. I walked and walked, free as a bird, like I don’t remember ever walking in the US.

When I am in Israel, what will I paint? Will I prepare for a show? My plan is to teach. Will I put up fliers and try to get students? I’m thinking of volunteering with the traumatized. I want to be of service.

Last night, at long last, I had a vision again. I would like to paint the prophets, with distracted eyes and their wild hair fluttering in the wind, in the halflight of dawn. A little like Sprick’s Souls in Purgatory, but with a lot of Ribera and Zubaràn in it. Everything will depend on finding the right model(s). We are living in Biblical times; this was evident during the Twelve Day War. There are going to be big changes. I don’t know what they will be. It’s a scary time. G-d works on a very big canvas with very big brushes and collateral damage happens.

Still, if I have a vision, I can paint.

When I tell Jews in the US that we’re making Aliyah, they invariably say, “You know there’s a war there.” To which I respond, “You know there’s a war here.” They have no idea what I’m talking about. They have only been imbibing the propaganda, they have no idea what’s really going on. They will figure it out too late.

I knew from his book that Solomon painted thinly but it wasn’t until I saw that photograph that I realized how thin was thin. He practically stains the canvas; there is almost no paint there. His version of impasto is what any other artist (except for maybe Whistler) would use for any old passage. Is this desirable? It wouldn’t be to some people. I like the look.

Actually I fricking love the look and I want it.

Back when I started atelier training in 2019, I copied this painting. I decided to copy it again, because I know more now and I can get more out of it. But I don’t need to copy the whole thing. I’m not interested in the whole composition. I’m interested in how he paints the face. So I’m going to try it again. Another conversation. See what he has to say.

Here’s the full piece:

Maybe you think oh ho hum but I think this portrait is ravishing. A lot of old portraits are all mask, the image the subject wants to project to the world. There’s an intimacy here that’s rare. A combination of solidity and serene liveliness; it’s a magical portrait. And it’s a painter’s painting, with perfect technique. How did he do it?

As with any master copy where you’re working from photographs and not from life, it’s hard to tell exactly what the palette was. The Lyme palette is colder and less yellow than the palette in the reproduction of the whole painting above, so I had to pick one. I picked the image above. Will it allow me to trace his steps? Will I mix something, say, too yellow? Maybe. Who cares. I will still learn.

For this piece, I needed a surface with a real linen weave, because Solomon’s work is all about the weave of the canvas. He says right out, as soon as you lose sight of the weave, your work has become too heavy and it has lost its freshness. I have found that to be true in my own work. Colleen Barry and Will St. John both talk about how a painting can take two, three layers and then it starts to get heavy. I’ve tested going past that. They’re right. Thin is best.

I needed a surface with a proper weave and couldn’t just use a piece of paper or a piece of Masonite, or even that godforsaken awful Arches canvas paper that blighted my Velazquez copy. A few years ago, I was gifted a 6x8 inch Raymar oil primed linen panel as swag at some art event. Gorgeous thing. I had been hoarding it.

I gridded it up and drew his sister with pencil. When I grid up a piece, I get the drawing in and then I erase the grid, which means I have to get the drawing in before there’s any paint on the panel because paint would interfere with erasing. That meant I had to draw it before laying down an imprimatura. So be it. I drew it with a #1 sable rigger (round brush with very long hairs), using Raw Sienna mixed with a medium that was 1:1 spike oil of lavender and linseed oil. Why did I use medium at all? Because I planned to go back over it with an imprimatura, and if I only used a solvent, the drawing would come back up. It needed a proper binder to keep it down. Why did I use Raw Sienna? Because that’s approximately the hue I saw in the imprimatura. I wanted something close enough to the imprimatura that I could get the drawn line to disappear if and when I wanted to lose an edge. Not so light that I couldn’t see the drawing, and not so dark that I would be forced to cover the drawing with an opaque later.

Gave it two days to dry. Today I got started with the actual painting.

I took a good look at Solomon’s imprimatura and decided it’s not Raw Umber. It’s not Raw Sienna. Take a look:

It’s Raw Umber with a lot of Transparent Yellow Oxide, which was a very pleasant surprise. Already he’s taught me something. Remember, Raw Umber is an opaque or a semi-opaque. Depending on the brand it can range from dark gold to a warm neutral to a brownish olive green. I favor Old Holland’s Raw Umber because it’s the most gold, but it’s still not as gold as we see here. Adding Transparent Yellow Oxide makes the color sing. Raw umber alone would be too dark and the Transparent Yellow Oxide lightens it up just enough. For that lesson alone the master copy was worth doing.

I figured Solomon probably used turpentine to thin down his paint for the imprimatura but I didn’t want to put my lungs through that so I used spike oil of lavender instead, and that was another revelation. Because although spike oil is a solvent, it’s an oily solvent. I laid down the imprimatura with a #8 Robert Simmons Signet bristle flat, and to my surprise, the combination of spike oil on top of the panel’s oil ground meant that the paint moved around quite easily. It wasn’t slippery like painting on glass; it was just perfect. It took almost no effort to get an even value. I didn’t need a fluffy brush, didn’t need a fan brush, just that bristle flat did the trick. Even a “nonabsorbent” acrylic ground gives you a bit of an argument on your first layer, but the spike oil on the oil ground meant the paint just behaved.

It is luxurious to have the paint just do what you tell it to do.

Now, a #8 flat is a wide brush, it’s maybe 3/4” across, and the face is just under life size, and I could see that that big brush would be good for working the big masses. So I kept on going with that big brush, and it worked, largely because bristle is stiff and can be used to lay down or remove paint, depending on your pressure and control, and the surface allowed the paint to do what I told it to do instead of getting absorbed into the ground. The big brush gave me nice big masses without a fussy look. When I needed a little more control, I went in with a #4 Escoda Optimo Kolinsky round. And it just did what I told it to do, it was an amazing painting day.

I used to know a small engine airplane pilot, and he told me that his flying habit was as expensive as cocaine. An attachment to Kolinsky brushes, by the way, is about as expensive. I understand that watercolorists can keep these brushes for years. For me, they’re at their best the first day, and they remain good for maybe three sessions, although I usually stretch them to limp along for a couple of years. Some people love worn out brushes, but I don’t. I’m really kind to my brushes in cleanup and storage, but I go through Kolinsky’s like potato chips. The hairs break against panels and they abrade on canvas. I try to use cheaper and kinder synthetic substitutes whenever possible but the action of a real Kolinsky, well it just makes a perfect point and it never goes clumsy as it comes off the surface, and I haven’t tried a synthetic that can compete.

I know my shadow is not as dark as Solomon’s. That’s on purpose. To keep the paint thin, I will build up the shadows in two or three layers. I’ve got the black jacket indicated to get a sense of how dark is dark and how cold is cold, but I’m not going to commit to the final shadow values until I have the halftones in and I know how light is light and how red is red.

I didn’t start the halftones because once you start that, you have to follow through. You have to make decisions at peak performance for a couple of hours. I was already getting a little mentally tired after what I had done so I called it a day for the giornata. Some people can go all day, I can’t. I’m a sprinter, always have been. I always ask myself before I start something that will take sustained concentration, have I got the energy and the focus? because if I don’t think I can make it to the end, if I think the quality of my decisions will slack off, if I think I’ll get to a point where I start fudging things, I don’t start that segment of the work. Better to do it when I’m fresh. Better to do it right the first time than to have to fix work that was messed up because I painted it tired.

However, one thing I’ve noticed while doing this copy: Solomon is very fast and loose with his Transparent Oxide Yellow and it really jazzes up his colors. When he mixes that yellow with Indian Red, for instance, in the shadows, the mixture loses the plodding stolid quality I often associate with Indian Red. It sings with an internal glow.

So tomorrow I’ll continue with this adventure, and see where it takes me.

I just finished my painting, “Sling Practice,” and in this piece I did something I don’t usually do and I want to talk about it.

I used opaque pigments in the shadows.

Traditional technique says to make your shadows more luminous and your lights and halftones more solid, you should use transparent pigments in the shadows and opaques and semi-opaque pigments in the halftones and highlights. I’ve been doing that all my life. In this piece, I broke the rule.

John Singer Sargent called that business of using transparents in the shadows “a trick.” Apparently he didn’t limit himself with orthodoxy.

In his book, The Practice of Oil Painting and Drawing, Sargent’s contemporary, Solomon J. Solomon, walks you through painting a standard academic portrait. He uses Indian red in the shadows. That choice really stood out to me when I first read it because it violates the “transparents in the shadows” rule.

How do you know a pigment’s transparency or opacity? Obviously you can tell if the name of the pigment is something like “Transparent Red Iron Oxide” but most paint names are not so obvious. If you’re buying the paint online, look at the “Pigment Information.” It doesn’t always tell you whether the pigment is transparent, opaque or something in between, but it should:

Iron oxides range from completely transparent to completely opaque, with everything in between. Their hues can be anything from yellows through oranges and reds to muted purples. To read that something is an iron oxide doesn’t tell you much. An Indian Red should be an opaque, cold muted red, and the description we get on this Old Holland Indian Red is true to type. However, colors vary from manufacturer to manufacturer and often the pigments that make up a paint have nothing to do with the composition traditionally associated with the color name (e.g., Cerulean Blue or Vermillion), so you should always look up what pigments the manufacturer used to create the paint and what are its properties of transparency/opacity, hue and drying times, so that the paint you buy use behaves as you expect.

Here’s a detail of Solomon’s portrait of his sister, and while Indian red is not the only pigment he used in the shadows, he probably did use it, particularly on the ear, in the core of the cheek, under the nose and chin, and maybe in the pit of the eye:

Here’s a Henry Raeburn who predated Solomon by around a century, also using Indian red in the shadows:

Now that we’ve demonstrated the nice effects you can get with this opaque color, let’s just say no color is a magic silver bullet that is going to make all your paintings sing. You need to understand why this color works, because it will not work in all lighting situations, and you need to understand why you might choose a given pigment. Let’s zoom out and talk about what issues you consider when you decide which pigment(s) to put in your shadows.

The first issue is getting the right value. This is more complicated than it sounds. You want to avoid making the shadows darker than you actually see them. Let’s talk about one of your classic shadow pigments, Raw Umber., which by the way is all over Solomon’s portrait of his sister. Raw Umber is a very dark semi-opaque pigment, and as to temperature it’s kind of neutral. Some manufacturers’ versions are warmer, some colder, but think of the hue as pretty much in the middle. Add white to bring it up to the right value, and your shadow will go cold and chalky. This can be OK if you have a very high key painting but usually white in a shadow will kill the piece.

Last year I was outside with another artist who was painting the rocks on a cliff. As I watched one paint, her piece was going very well, and then she noticed that her shadow color was too dark. She was painting on a white ground and she could have just made the paint thinner, but to my surprise, instead she mixed the dark color with white and laid it down heavily. Immediately the piece looked amateurish and inept. A promising piece had died right before my eyes. She could have scraped that off and fixed it, but she didn’t know the solution and because she had a considerable ego and she didn’t ask me my opinion, I didn’t offer it.

So let’s talk about your options for luminous shadows.

You can paint your shadows on a light ground (imprimatura). The pale ground shining through the pigment lightens its value. This works for semi-opaques like Raw Umber or any opaque, but the paint must be thin. It’s not so easy to get the value even, but with skill it’s possible. With a light ground, you can also use transparent pigments to achieve the jewel-like freshness of a watercolor in your shadows, but a layer of a transparent pigments thick enough to give you the right value can look uneven and heavy, so you want to build up the value over more than one painting session. The downside of this method is that since it takes you a while to get to the final value, you haven’t quickly asserted how dark dark gets and it can take a bit of fiddling to figure out your value structure. That’s a serious downside.

Another possibility is to use a pigment that’s not that dark to begin with, so it doesn’t need to be lightened. So, for instance, some people pull out all the stops and use Cadmium red in their shadows. I have a more muted palette so I like the siennas, and this time I tried Indian Red. The cool morning light in my painting above meant that Indian Red was too hot for my shadow so I cooled it down with a greenish Raw Sienna.

On the next trip to the studio, the shadow looked too cool so I lay down a glaze of Transparent Orange Iron Oxide on it and that brought it to what I wanted. If I had used a bit of Burnt Sienna (as an orange) along with the Raw Sienna and the Indian Red on the first layer, that might have sufficed so that I would not have needed the glaze.

What’s nice about having an opaque in a shadow is that it lays down a nice flat even value. It has more body and is more assertive than a transparent, and if you keep the paint thin, the shadow doesn’t get heavy. Best of all, you get the value you want right off. When you use an opaque that’s around the final value you want in your shadow, you don’t have to do that dance that transparents require of you, where it takes a few sessions before you’ve figured out your value range.

So let’s look at Solomon’s portrait of his sister. What pigments did he actually use in the shadow? I would guess it’s a mixture of Raw and Burnt Siennas, maybe darkened with a touch of Burnt Umber, and warmed in places with Indian Red. What pigments he used are what were relevant to his particular lighting situation. Your mileage may vary but the principle holds. The important thing is that the shadow shape is even, warm, and the right value, not too light and not too dark. The transition between the halftone and the shadow is warmed further with a bit of what is probably Alizarin Crimson. Which, by the way, is transparent, and transparents are great for transitions. Alizarin Crimson is notorious for fading but alone as a glaze over dry paint it’s safe. And I think that’s what he used.

Let’s reiterate the principles. If your light is neutral or cold, warm shadows will give you vibrancy. Remember there is no magic color that will make the right warm shadow in every lighting situation, just remember it must be warmer than your light shapes. A nice generic “warm” is in the orange range but it can tip towards yellow or red (or if you’re using fancy lighting, it can be almost any color but that’s advanced so let’s not go there right now). You need to ensure your shadow is the right value, not too light nor too dark, and it’s nice to nail that value right off. While transparent pigment in the shadows can give a lovely effect, opaques pigment can give you a nice even flat shape right off of whatever value you want, if you pick the right pigments. Don’t add white.

Colleen is a great painter, and her work draws heavily on tension between the archetype of mother-and-child vs archetypes of wild nature such as wolves or African wild dogs. In Colleen’s work, there is a connection and an affinity between the primal, wild animal and the mother. American artists have a long history of depicting Nature as something scary and destructive or overwhelmingly beautiful but rarely as something protective and intimate. In this context, Barry’s work is novel. There is a lot of juice in the tension between a wild carnivorous animal and the Madonna/Child, and I expect it will be a while before she has finished exploring the relationship.

Why bother with archetypes at all? Why paint an archetype?

Archetypes are universal; they function deep in our consciousness and they function across cultures and across time. They don’t have to be explained; we understand them intuitively. Are they part of us? Do you have within you, for instance, the Sage, the Hero, the Virgin, the Witch, the Wildman? I think we all do, and that explains why, when we paint an archetype, the depths of that character don’t have to be explained.

The archetype is an abstraction, a thematic slice of you. It simplifies your complexity in the same way a mathematical equation simplifies a problem, by excising all insignificant variables.

The reason to paint an archetype is because there is something going on in your life that requires you to get in touch with what that archetype knows. It gives you a chance to experience your life through the archetype. It’s not worship. It’s dialog. It’s guidance. It’s finding the small still voice inside that already knows what you need to remember. You want to delve into it, you want to feel what that archetype would feel in a given situation, and painting is your vehicle for the journey. To paint realistically, you have to understand the body underneath its surface, you have to imaginatively trace the bones and wrap them with muscles and construct the figure from the inside out as well as the outside in, so in realistic painting, you have to imaginatively go inside the archetype’s body, feel its gesture dance through your own body, feel how everything in the painting feels to that archetype, and then come out again through the surface. That is quite a journey.

When I describe the act of painting, I keep coming back over and over again to Carlos Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan. In this book, the narrator is on a quest for knowledge. Under the tutelage of a Yaqi Indian master, he takes various drugs to achieve visions. In one of these visions, he becomes a crow, takes flight, and sees the world as the crow sees it. So in this example, the narrator never did become a crow but he discovered and stretched out into the part of himself that could go explore from a height. Painting is the same kind of journey, without drugs.

To paint a feral mother, you search out, find and come to intimately know that feral mother within yourself. The value of this encounter is that it can give you a hint how to be the feral mother you need to be.

The value of viewing art based on archetypes is that the artist can take us on a journey to that slice of ourselves that otherwise we may never have been able to reach.

When you’re first learning how to paint in oils or acrylics, you will encounter a few immediate precipices. One is having all your colors fight each other. On that later. One is making mud. On that still later. One is getting your colors chalky.

White is a low chroma blue. What does that mean? It means that when you add white to any hue, the white will cool down the color. Yes it gets lighter, but it also gets colder. It sucks the life out of your warms. The more opaque your white is, the more dramatic this phenomenon is.

Most beginner painters start with Titanium White, which is the most opaque white. It’s not the coldest white but it’s up there.

There is nothing wrong with Titanium White, but like all colors it has a particular personality due to its chemical makeup, and there are certain ways to work with it. As you add more Titanium to go lighter and lighter, you may want to add some of a warm to counter the chilling affect of white. Or you may want to get your values in quickly and efficiently as Titanium is wont to do, let the paint dry, and then get the hue back with a glaze. More on that later.

2. Why would you use a translucent white

A translucent white can help you avoid chalkiness, probably because the white isn’t very strong so it is less assertive against the hue of your mixture as you go lighter.

There are a few translucent whites. A lot of people used to use Zinc white, which is a bluish translucent white that can work really well for flesh. Zinc, by the way, is the coldest white. The problem with it is that it cracks over time. Once chemists discovered this problem, painting with Zinc became a no-no. There are people who use a mixed Zinc/Titanium white, e.g., the brand name “Permalba,” and some people do great work with it. Opinions are mixed whether a mixture of some other white with Zinc will crack. Many manufacturers have taken Zinc out of their product lines altogether because of the cracking problem.

The most stable and popular translucent white is made of lead, which means it’s poisonous; it will absorb through the skin and over time it will cause any number of health problems, e.g. madness or deafness. However, nitrile gloves will keep you safe from tactile absorption, and you don’t have to worry about fumes.

Lead white goes under the nomenclature of “Flake” or “Cremnitz” or “Silver” white. It’s a “warm” white, with a cast very slightly towards yellow. Being translucent, it doesn’t blow out a color when you mix it in. That said, you need a lot more Flake White than you do Titanium to crank up your mixture to a light value. This can be a good thing because it gives you some quantity of paint with body to load on your brush rather than having to resort to medium to get the paint to move.

Flake also has the lovely quality of drying overnight or over a few days, as opposed to Titanium, which can take weeks to dry. Because it dries fast, Flake can be nice for the lower layers of a painting; you don’t have to wait weeks to go over it, to create greater subtlety, to knit transitions.

Because Flake is translucent, it is terrific for transitions between values or between hues.

Because Flake is translucent, when you lay it down over an even value, it will want to lay down unevenly; it takes care and technique to get a mixture with Flake even over a large area. Whatever is underneath will show through somewhat because the paint is only a veil, which means that any unevenness of pressure or paint volume across a stroke or from stroke to stroke will show the underlayer more or less. That said, that same irregularity can make a mixture with Flake in it very much alive. It’s what gives an ébauche its “scratchy” look, as Colleen Barry would say. You can make Flake’s irregularity work for you; over the course of a shape, value shifts can give the piece life if the value shifts are minimal.

Because Flake is translucent, and whatever is underneath shows through, if you have a mass of one value next to a mass of a different value, Flake will help you transition between the two masses.

3. Why would you use an opaque white

Opaques have the lovely quality of decisiveness. You mix the color you want, you lay down the shape you want, it covers whatever is under it. You have a nice even hue and value over the expanse of that shape. You can mix a string of 3, 5, 10, 20 values, and when you lay down the exact value you need, what you mixed is what you get. You don’t have to, but you can paint like a paint-by-number when you use Titanium.

There is also the issue that Titanium is a very bright white. It’s brighter than Flake and far brighter than Stack Flake White. It gives you a nice, bright, clean expanse of light when you need one. For that reason, Flake is my white of choice for brilliant skies, at least the first layer.

The problem with Titanium is that it can be tricky to make transitions with it because of its opacity. If your style is to lay a stroke down and never touch it again, you solve this problem by mixing strings that have large numbers of value stops, or by mixing a puddle of the darkest value of a hue you will need, and then adding tiny amounts of white again and again as you paint your way towards the light. If you do allow yourself to move the paint around after it’s been laid down, you solve the transitions problem by using blending tools like dry brushes or fan brushes. Either way, you will have to tweak the hue as you go towards the light to reflect the hue differences between halftones and light.

In asserting your value structure, you may find that your opaque white (e.g., Titanium), has blown out these directly-mixed hues, the colors have gone weak and cold, and the whole painting has gone chalky.

Fret not. There is a fix.

4. Why would you use a glaze

Laying down your value structure with mixtures of white plus some low-chroma dark opaque is a valid approach; to bring up the color, after it’s dry, you glaze over it with your high-chroma transparent. This is a time-honored technique and you see it, for instance, all over Vermeer.

Here in the Girl with the Pearl Earring, most likely Vermeer asserted the value structure in the blue headscarf with a low chroma grisaille, maybe vine or bone black plus Flake (since they didn’t have Titanium in his day). Then once it was dry, he glazed over this grisaille with a thin layer of the extremely expensive ground lapis lazuli that was the precursor of our contemporary, dirt-cheap and more brilliant ultramarine blue.

The cost of the blue pigment is probably the reason he used this technique.

Nowadays paintings with lots of Titanium/Ultramarine mixtures tend to be your poster children for chalkiness. Same with Titanium/Cadmium mixtures. There is a reason why the masters used to say there are some effects you can’t get alla prima, meaning with direct mixtures. Sometimes you have to let your piece dry before you can get the colors you want.

Your remedy for a chalky painting is to lay down a glaze of pigment over the chalky passage once it’s thoroughly dried. Meaning, you mix your pigment with some kind of medium and lay it over. You don’t mix it with white. You get your value by controlling the amount of pigment in the glaze. What medium you use for your glaze is your choice, but since it’s going to be on top of an existing layer or layers, it should have some oil in it (as a binder) and not be straight solvent, or down the line you’ll get oil resist problems with that glaze layer. I tend to use some of the classic mixtures, e.g., a 1:1 mixture of linseed, walnut or stand oil with some solvent like turpentine, spike oil of lavender, or mineral spirits. Or I will use a gel medium like Oleogel, or an alkyd medium like Galkyd or Liquin. You choose whatever you like. Oleogel is nice for a glaze in that the gel itself has body so it gives you a lot of control over how much pigment is in with the gel and where you apply that mixture, but which medium you use depends on the effect you want.

5. Dealing with the long drying time of Titanium

A few winters ago, I was painting in my barn studio, which had a winter temperature of about 45°F, and I had a terrible time with paint not drying. A not very thick layer containing Titanium white literally took a month to dry to the touch. One manufacturer’s Flake also took I think two weeks to dry; they must have put additives in it. I think that was Michael Harding but it might have been Williamsburg. So on a side note, the only Flake I have tried that reliably dries overnight is Rublev’s Flake White #1. I have some Vasari Flake White that I haven’t tried yet; just because Rublev’s is the only one I know works only means I haven’t tried all manufacturers’ Flake white formulations.

I have since come up with a foolproof strategy to make Titanium white dry within 1-2 days: when you first set it out on the palette, mix it with a few drops of black oil (otherwise known as dark drying oil). Black oil is white lead cooked in linseed oil, and it’s an ancient drier that Rembrandt, Velazquez and a lot of the other old masters used. I first learned about it when I read Maroger’s formulae for old masters’ mediums back in the Brown University stacks when I was around 20. I remember these were like 16th century recipes and they read something like, “Outside, in a crucible, cook white lead in oil…” because even then they knew it was extremely poisonous and shouldn’t be done in an inside space. Dispense with an eyedropper (I use two to three drops per maybe one inch of Titanium squeezed from a big tube), while wearing nitrile gloves, and mix in with a palette knife. Any mixture you make with this will be dry in a day or two.

I haven’t had 30 years to verify that this is good policy but I haven’t had any problems with cracking, crazing, wrinkling, darkening, any of those bugaboos of bad medium mixtures.

On a related note, many paint manufacturers have convenience colors that are something mixed with Titanium white; for instance, King’s blue is Titanium mixed with Ultramarine. That black oil trick works with convenience colors too; just remember to mix in a little oil when you first squeeze out the color. Don’t mix it in when you are mixing your puddles or your premixtures or you’ll be likely to put in too much.

6. Dealing with the short drying time of Flake

I actually *like* the short drying time of Flake white, but I recognize there are some artists who like a long drying time. You have a few choices. You could choose a Flake (or Cremnitz) where the lead was ground in walnut oil rather than linseed. Walnut oil makes a brighter Flake that will yellow less and so is nice for brilliantly light passages. Walnut oil dries slower than linseed so there you have it, a retardant as binder. If you can find a lead white ground in safflower oil, that dries slower still, so that’s another option.

If all that fails, there’s always clove oil. Unlike black oil, it’s not poisonous. I’ve never mixed it with paint but some people do. What I use clove oil for is to keep all the paints in my palette wet.

Here’s the trick. Buy a baker’s quarter sheet pan with lid, and get a sheet of glass cut to fit inside. The glass is your palette. I spray paint the back with automotive primer in a neutral grey of #5 value. Now here’s where the clove oil comes in: tape something absorbent, like a paper towel, to the inside of the plastic lid. Put a few drops of clove oil on the paper towel, and when you want to save what’s on your palette, just put down the lid and the fumes from the clove oil will retard the drying.

7. Impastos

You can paint impasto with Titanium and you can paint impasto with Flake. If your formulation is too buttery for impasto, you can mix it the paint with some sort of impasto medium or calcium carbonate to give the paint more body.

8. Nontoxic Lead White Emulations

Some people don’t want to paint with lead because of its poisonous qualities, perfectly understandable, and some people can’t paint with lead because it’s illegal in their country. So they need an alternative if they’re going to have access to a translucent white.

I have sampled some commercial Flake white emulations and didn’t like them. They had the drying time problems of Titanium.

Ben Valentine offers a recipe for a nontoxic Flake white emulation that I’ve tried and I think it’s good. It’s his recipe so I’m not going to repeat it here because I’m not going to steal his thunder. Go check his link if you’re interested.

Finally

Implicit in this little missive is the notion that within a single painting, you may use more than one white. You don’t have to worry about fat/lean issues in choosing your white, you only need to worry about the issue of opacity vs translucency.

So at times of complete turmoil like this one or when I’m out of ideas, I find the best way to spend my time is to do a master copy. It’s a low commitment painting that I don’t intend to exhibit, that I don’t even have to finish, and that keeps me painting and best of all, teaches me things. I get exposed to ideas and solutions I never would have considered if left to my own devices. Master copies make my dry periods some of my most fertile times. And always, always, I get an idea for a new painting before I’m done with the master copy, maybe because the exchange I have with a painter who is better than I am is stimulating.

Accordingly, I never finish a master copy. But I go through it far enough to learn what I came for.

One of the cool things about doing a master copy is that the better you get as an artist, the more you get out of doing a master copy, because you know and have mastered the conventions of its time, and you can observe how the artist tweaked them. In this post I’m going to tell you what I learned from this particular master copy.

The Original:

Why Copy a Velazquez

To determine what master to copy, do an objective critique of your body of work, identify a consistent weakness, and search for an artist who doesn’t have that weakness. The point of the master copy is to learn how they think and try out their solution to your problem.

The weaknesses I decided to concentrate on are that I have a long-standing habit of seeing linearly and that I tend to render darks too dark. Both these habits come from the fact that when I was young, the only people who knew how to draw were illustrators, so I taught myself how to see by emulating illustrators who worked in ink.

There are two ways of seeing form: what they call “conceptually” and what they call “optically”. When you think about form conceptually, you think of how it was constructed and then you apply laws of perspective and light to that conceptualization. For instance, to draw a leg you may think about the femur and then how the muscles will attach to it and to the hip and to the sides of the knee, you’ll think about how the muscles wrap, how some bulge and some flatten depending on which are doing the work, you’ll think about how the bones and muscles and tendons work together as they go back in space through the z-plane, you’ll think about where the light source is and where it strikes and where there is shadow and where there is reflection. You need to understand anatomy like a surgeon and light like an optician. This is a Renaissance way of thinking about form. Think, DaVinci. Think, 15th-16th centuries.

Then there is the optical way of thinking about form. The eye sees a pattern of color in a range of light and shadow, one shape next to the other, as a camera sees, without interpretation. Some things are sharp. Some things are blurred. If you get all the shapes and their juxtapositions right, you will nail the image. Its a way of seeing much favored by the Impressionists. You might know about this kind of seeing from Hawthorne, but the first artist to figure out how to do it was Velazquez, 17th century.

Both ways of seeing have their upsides and both have their downsides. The conceptual way of seeing tends to be linear; it’s all about the conceptual borders between negative and positive spaces, and these are often indicated with lines. It isn’t too good at blur because blur around a form does not make sense to a conceptual understanding; the closest it can get is sfumato, or form swallowed into a shadow, or an edge lost because the negative space is the same value. However, blur can increase an object’s sense of 3-D form and it is a critical tool to determine where the viewer’s eye goes in a composition. Conversely, an artist who paints like a camera without an understanding of the construction of the form (s)he describes is likely to draw that form a bit wrong, because sometimes you don’t see something unless you know what to look for. When someone says your work looks like you copied a photograph, that’s what they meant: you didn’t have the conceptual understanding of the form or optics to know how to override the ways that a photograph lies.

So in your training, you really want to learn to see both ways of seeing, and when you’re working, you tick back and forth between them. One way of seeing can be a test and a check against the other.

So because I have old habits that tie me to the line and not the mass, in picking someone to copy, I went to the guy who invented the concept of optical seeing, Velazquez, and found a nice big .jpg of one his self portraits:

As is usual for master copies, original is an odd size, 21-3/4 x 27 inches. Technically I should have cut a piece of linen and stretched it to size, primed it with rabbit skin glue and then laid down several coats of oil priming and an imprimatura if I really really wanted to be exact. But I didn’t do this piece to sell, so I cut corners. I cut a sheet of Arches “primed” canvas-textured paper and taped it to size. I don’t have plumbing in my studio so I didn’t stretch it with water, which shows how quick and dirty I was being about this but I didn’t think it would matter if there were some slight wrinkles. This was a big mistake; not using the right surface really mattered. Velazquez used a somewhat rough-textured canvas; today an equivalent might be rated “fine” (as opposed to “extra-fine”) and the texture I got from canvas-textured paper didn’t begin to emulate it. If I had used a heavy hot-press watercolor paper (e.g., 140 lb) like I usually do when I do a master copy, at least it would not have buckled. I won’t use this thin, lame, flimsy paper again, so consider this a warning to you.

This “primed” paper tends to be super absorbent so I laid down a coat of transparent gesso on it, then gave it an imprimatura. To nail the color I saw in the original, I mixed Rublev’s Cyprus Burnt Umber Warm with their French Raw Sienna and Flake White. The question was not what did Velazquez use because he would have used earth pigments particular to a certain region. The question was how to emulate that hue given modern paints.

Now, to paint it.

Research

Before you start a master copy, you want to do some research and find out if there is any information out there what pigments, surfaces or brushes the artist used, their working method, whatever you can find. I found precious little information. Generally when art historians give you technical information about an artist’s work, it may come from lab analysis (e.g, pigments or grounds), in which case the information is reliable, or it may be hearsay or their guess, in which case you have to test it.

The Imprimatura

An imprimatura is a layer of paint you lay down before you start painting. Its purpose is to unify the colors and give you an immediate sense of how dark is dark and how light is light. This imprimatura was made with some kind of opaque brown plus white. In Velazquez’s day, his browns would reflect the color of the earth of a particular area and I would bet he (or a helper or commercial canvas vendor) mixed it from a single umber and white. We now have pretty much standardized colors, none of which are exactly this, so I mixed my estimate via Raw Umber, Cyprus Burnt Umber Warm, and French Raw Sienna with Flake White. Your mixture can be a little too warm or cool but what really matters is that you nail the value, which is around a 5 (on a scale of 1-10). The reason the value matters is because its midtone will unify the values you put top of it. There will be no aberrant speckles of white or even say, the #7 value common in the 18th-19th centuries to show through and jar the eye.

The Drawing

I’ll be damned if I can find where I read it, but somewhere in my research I read that Velazquez tended to start by drawing with black chalk directly on the ground. When I do a master copy, I usually project the image but this time I didn’t, because I knew the way he drew would be a big part of the learning process. So I marked off a very rough grid on the tape around the image and used that grid to roughly place the shapes. Now, when there is paint on a surface, it’s hard to make a mark with charcoal, so I knew charcoal wouldn’t show over my imprimatura. So as a modern equivalent to black chalk, I used a Pierre Noir Conté pencil, because the wax in a Conté pencil would give it enough drag to show.

I could be wrong but it appeared to me that Velazquez was thinking of form in terms of straight lines that indicated turns of planes, and not circles and spheres/ovoids. Rembrandt thought of form in terms of circles; you can see it in his drawings. I made the chalk drawing very rudimentary, because I wanted to be doing most of my drawing in paint. Velazquez is about masses and I didn’t want to get caught up in line. The chalk drawing was just to locate the important masses.

Brushes

I found very little information on what kind(s) of brush(es) Velazquez might have used, but I know that in his era, all that was available to him were rounds. What kinds of hairs would he have used? I had to surmise by looking at the marks. Most if not all the marks look like they were made with a moderately stiff brush. He would have access to polecat hair, which is similar to sable, and he would have had access to ox hair, which is stiffer but has no spring. It looks like he used hog’s hair. Were they stiff or soft? In painting this master copy, I tried my soft bristle brushes and they splayed too much. I wound up painting the whole piece with mostly Robert Simmons Signet rounds, because they’re stiff and springy and they make marks not too different from those of Velazquez. The problem with stiff hog’s hair brushes is they remove as much paint as they lay down, especially when you’re working on a hard surface like paper on a drawing board. The problem is not so pronounced when you work on a stretched canvas, particularly one with a moderate weave, as he used.

The fact that I chose a quick-and-inexpensive surface for my copy created a series of problems. I compensated for my different surface by using a light touch so the paint wouldn’t come up when I laid it down. But you really want to emulate the whole gamut of an artist’s toolset if you want to learn how they think. Compensating takes you away from their thought process.

Pigments

I didn’t find this information anywhere, but a look at the Velazquez shows some places where the brunaille wasn’t covered, so we know he started with a brunaille. I wasn’t sure if he then went in with a grisaille and then did full color in a third layer, or if he went full color right away; I figured I’d find out.

I never found a definitive pigment listing. I found two that profoundly contradicted each other. The first was something I had saved off from Natural Pigments and which can no longer be found on their site, and it lists:

• Lead-Tin Yellow

• Naples Yellow

• Hematite

• Yellow Ochre

• Brown Ochre

• Orange Ochre

• Vermillion

• Raw Umber

• Lead White

• Bone Black

These are almost all opaque or semi-opaque pigments. Conversely, a pigment listening from the Padasor Roma Trastavere:

• Lead-Tin Yellow

• Naples Yellow

• Transparent Yellow Iron Oxide

• Transparent Orange Iron Oxide

• Transparent Red Iron Iron Oxide

• Transparent Brown Iron Oxide

• Vermilion

• Red Lake

• Lead White

• Bone Black

There are some areas of agreement and some areas of disagreement, particularly in the addition of all those transparent iron oxides, and the fact that this pigment listing has no umbers, no siennas, no ochres. That’s novel. A dark Naples Yellow can sub for a yellow ochre, but everybody uses umbers for their brunailles.

It is not unusual that art historians will disagree about technical details. You have to get in and test to find out what’s what.

Did he use an umber and Padasor just got it wrong? I squeezed out raw umber, burnt umber, and transparent brown oxide to test it:

I did the brunaille with a #2 Simmons Signet hog’s hair round, because Signet hogs hairs are stiff and that helps when you want precision in your shapes.

I liked doing a brunaille with transparent brown oxide. The transparency of the color gave me more control over value than any umber will give you, because umbers are semi-opaque to opaque.

The Ébauche

When I looked long and hard at the 5:00 stubble area of the cheeks, it became obvious to me that that color was not lead white plus bone black; it was too warm. Also, if Velazquez had lain down a grisaille in the halftones, there would at least be a glaze on top, or at least a velatura (translucent layer). There was no glaze there; the hue there was what Velazquez had lain down directly. Therefore, after the brunaille, he went straight to a full-color ébauche, so so did I.

As I got into the ébauche (blocking-in) layer, I found I needed the opacity of raw umber, particularly in the hair, and I needed the way raw umber cools down flesh without cooling it as radically as black, so I hauled it out. Testing had shown that Velazquez had indeed used raw umber. Had he used it for his brunaille? Maybe, but doing the brunaille with a transparent brown showed me an option I never considered.

The most interesting thing about doing this master copy was watching Velazquez draw. I laid down a couche (pronounced “coosh,” an overall middle value for a big shape as a base layer that enables you to work wet-into-wet) and then watched him work it up (lighter) and down (darker) as he and I modeled the form. I watched him make transitions between the shadow areas and the background around and within the form.

He makes extensive use of a rag:

• to get a unified value across a shape (see the doublet);

• to draw (see the doublet).

These techniques which remove paint are only possible because his imprimatura is a middle value and a warm tone that gives life both to halftones and to shadow. If the imprimatura had been light or if he had worked on a white canvas, that light surface would break up values in a jarring way where the paint is discontinuous. I had known about working up from a middle ground back in my 20s when I first started studying Rembrandt but Velazquez’s imprimatura is darker and warmer than Rembrandt’s usual greyish imprimatura. It’s much darker than your standard 19th century French academic imprimatura, which tended to be maybe a value 7.

A dark imprimatura can give your whole piece a dark look. The reason the Impressionists often painted on white canvases is because you can get more brilliant coloristic effects if your colors are on a white ground. But a dark imprimatura gives you unity for free. If your work relies more on value than on color (and most do), this advantage is not to be disparaged.

When I got to the background, I saw that Velazquez had laid down a very thin wash — what Whistler called a “soup” — and he hadn’t used the rag or a dry brush to unify the tone but rather had just left it as is. What had he used to thin the paint? He could have used a solvent like turpentine; that’s a real possibility, but a solvent cuts down on the paint’s ability to bind to the surface. More likely he mixed linseed oil with some kind of solvent. I used Chelsea Studio’s Thin Medium, which is a combination (probably 1:1) of linseed oil and spike oil of lavender. Guaranteed it is not identical to what Velazquez used but it would be close and it allowed me to emulate his effect.

The Result

I think I worked on this piece for maybe four sittings. As always, I worked on it until I felt I had learned what he had to teach me and no longer, because I want to get to a painting of my own. This is where I left it:

Postmortem

One of the reasons I quit at this point is that I wasn’t learning much. I had studied so many people who came after Velazquez that I had already learned most of what decisions I was following in this master copy from other artists.

I think the biggest thing I got out of doing this was a reminder that there is a lot to be gained from coming off a mid-tone imprimatura. I knew this in my 20s but I hadn’t worked that way since. I didn’t quite nail the hue; once I got into the painting I realized I had made it too hot but what was done was done. Next time, maybe just straight raw umber.

It was also interesting that I don’t think he used a soft brush anywhere. I haven’t done a painting with just hog’s hair bristles since before I started atelier training.

I had mentioned that scholars disagree on whether a lot of his pigments were transparent or opaque; you can have this disagreement because, for instance, iron oxides run the whole gamut between transparent and opaque and chemically they’ll be the same. The behavior under the brush between transparent and opaque are so different they’re like night and day. I think his reds were probably transparent, and most of his yellows were opaque. But which you choose to use in your own work, it doesn’t really matter, whatever you get to work.

His approach to form was a reminder to think in terms of geometric planes going backwards into space, but I’d already been doing that.

His approach to optical seeing is mostly visible around the chin/neck/collar area, and that also wasn’t new to me.

I found his edge choices interesting, particularly the remnants of a linear drawing on the left side of the face (his right side). That was not what I was expecting from a Velazquez, and if I look for a rationale for it, I would say it’s because compositionally you want to literally connect as much of your dark masses as possible, and that line to the left of the face connects the dark mass of the doublet to the dark mass of the hair. He may or may not have seen it as that dark a shadow but he put it in because it served a purpose.

Whenever I do a master copy, what I get out of it is never what I expected to get out of it. Always the artists are more interesting than we expect them to be, but you don’t get to see that until you put you walk in their footprints.

The paper gave me a lot of problems. Even though I laid down a couple of coats of Michael Harding’s nonabsorbent acrylic gesso on it, it sucked up the oil of the paint and I had a terrible problem with sinking in. I simply couldn’t see the values. I oiled it out for the final photo so I could see what I had. So moral of that story: when you’re doing a master copy, use the master’s surface. It’s just as important as his brushes.

With all the news outlets calling me a genocidal baby eater who runs the media and controls the world, with all the “humanitarian” organizations and the UN and almost all of Europe’s politicians and half of social media repeating this trope all day, every single day, it’s been really, really hard for me to concentrate, but I have decided to proceed full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes. You can’t curl up and die, no matter how much world wishes you would.

The zeitgeist, the ubiquitous hatred, weighs me down but you just can’t stay down. You have to find a way to fight your way back up.

It started with an Instagram reel by Zach Ross and was reinforced by recent essays by Yonaton Daon and Melanie Phillips. Innumerable times on social media, when Jews or Israelis try to lay down facts to counter the ubiquitous lies about us, our feeds are flooded with comments that don’t listen to us, that don’t believe us, that scream for our deaths and aren’t interested in retro things like evidence or lack thereof and moral consistency. After two years of laying down the facts to find that no one is listening, after learning the history that Nazism survived as colonialist, jihadist Islamism which has become normalized and is spreading throughout the West like the lava that engulfed Pompeii, after watching the world cheer whenever Jews are gunned down or firebombed for the sin of being alive, I’ve come to the conclusion that the world actually believes that, as the college kids chanted, “There is only one solution, the Final Solution.”

I recognize not all people feel this way. There is a silent majority. The problem with silent majorities is that they’re passive. Let me make an analogy. When you were a kid in the schoolyard, there was the bully, and behind the bully were the cowards who backed the bully so he wouldn’t pick on them. There was the poor kid he singles out to torment, and that kid is forced to be very brave. Likely as not, at the moment of the attack, that kid’s friends disappeared like smoke, where the hell did they go. And then there are all the other kids, the majority of kids, who either clear out or just stand and watch, or maybe they jeer. In the schoolyard and in the political arena, the same dynamic occurs, it’s totally Lord of the Flies. As John Stuart Mills said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The silent majority does not help.

So now I have clarity. I understand that personally don’t deserve to exist, because of my ethnicity. What’s a Jew to do? Shine our lights. Do what we do best. Sing, dance, find a way to feel love and joy somewhere and damn the torpedoes. Otherwise they win.

I’m back to painting. Once again, it was another week of blood libels, murders and paranoia. Every morning I read the harrowing news and by late morning I haul my sorry butt to the studio and try not to think about what I read. How do I cope with the oppressive weight of the zeitgeist? I’m still thinking about David in the wilderness, hunted and writing psalms and music. The subject is worthy. I gave it another go.

I was going to do a master copy but when I went through the archives of masterworks I’d saved off to my computer, I saw some Jules Bretons that told me exactly what I had been doing wrong in my Davids, particularly this one below, and the answer was so obvious I didn’t feel I actually had to go through the motions of copying it:

If I had had a living model I could have brought to a field at the right time of day in the right weather this David painting would have been a no-brainer because everything would have been right there before me, but I didn’t and I still don’t so reconstructing the lighting is something I’ve had to do from clues.

The Breton helps me give myself a proper crit(ique):

I see that I needed to lighten the value (light/dark) of the sky by several stops, damp down the value of the figure several stops and make the flesh hue more magenta. It was too yellow.

I asked the questions I would ask a student to whom I just gave a bad crit: What is important about this pose? The chest? No, it’s irrelevant. What matters is the gesture of the head, the earnest supplication and the ecstasy. Then get rid of the chest. What is important about the landscape? Is it the land? No, it’s the sky. You scarcely need the land, it just sets a context. OK, then get rid of most of it. What is important about the lighting? The radiance of the sky, even though it’s overcast. OK, then darken the flesh to make the sky more radiant.

I made another rough GIMP mockup, and that gave me clear direction:

In my last couple of pieces, I’ve started not by working out the drawing on paper and doing a transfer, but by drawing directly on the panel with paint and brush. It’s how my mother learned to paint at the Boston Museum School and it’s how she taught me when I was a child. For the most part I haven’t done it since. It’s an Impressionist approach that can help you see in masses rather than in line. It’s a little risky because if you don’t nail the drawing in paint, you’ll have to make corrections with opaques. That leads you to the issue that once you’ve got an opaque layer down so you’ve lost the radiance of the white ground, if you do lay down a transparent, it will never sing like your first layer. Nonetheless, there have been great painters (like Tarbell or Thayer) who painted this way. It’s a perfectly valid way to work.

Part of working with opaques is using titanium for your white, and titanium is notorious for making your work chalky. In my next post, I’ll address the whole issue of what white to use when, how to avoid chalkiness, and how to claw your way back when your piece has gone chalky.

Another thing I did in this piece that is unusual for me is that I painted it mostly with flats and brights. A flat is a brush where the hairs are fairly long (about as long as in a round) but the ferrule (the metal collar around the hairs) has been flattened. A bright is just like a flat only the hairs are shorter. I believe the whole business of a flattened ferrule first appeared in the 18th century when brushes started to be made with a metal ferrule rather than a quill. A flat can make a thin mark on its side or a broad mark on its front or back, so it leaves a very characteristic signature. A bright’s mark is similar to a flat’s mark, but because it’s stiffer and shorter, the mark is more square, more controlled, less exuberant. When we think of the mark of a flat, we might think of a Sargent; compare his marks to Rembrandt’s, who used rounds — big difference. For the 40 years I was painting before I started atelier training, I used brights almost exclusively. I stopped when I started atelier training because my teachers used rounds.

I hadn’t planned to use brights on this painting, but I’d gotten the drawing wrong, and when I was going back in to fix it, the ready geometricality of a bright, combined with how it quickly allows you to delineate and cover a shape, meant that when I distractedly looked over for which brush was suited to the purpose, the bright jumped up and said, “Pick me!”

And the brush just did what I told it to do, with no arguments. It was like, “Oh baby why did I ever leave you?”

So this is what resulted. On this third attempt to convey David the praise singer, I finally got what I was looking for. This one didn’t take me long. Even though the painting is smallish, 12”x16”, the fact that the face is large and the shapes are large meant I could go in with pretty big brushes and not get stuck in that tight rendering mode that little brushes encourage.

Against habit, this time I allowed myself to mostly use titanium for my white rather than flake (lead), so I was able to get my lights immediately and not have to build them up over a few painting sessions.

When you mix a value string with titanium white, what you see on your palette is what you will see on the painting. Because flake (lead) white is semi-transparent, what you mix on your palette is not what you will see on your painting. You’ll see what you mixed under the influence of whatever is underneath it. You won’t get the value you mixed and you even may not get the hue you mixed. The reason to use flake is because transitions are much easier with flake than with titanium. So in this piece, I have pretty much three layers: 1) block in as usual with transparents; 2) go over that with opaques/titanium to establish and nail down the value structure of the composition; 3) refine with transparents and opaques as needed.

Skies really like titanium white and when you’re doing light showing through clouds, you really need its sparkle. The anatomy of clouds is best treated geometrically, keeping in mind these are forms going backwards into the z-plane; treat them with the same seat-of-your-pants intuitive perspective as you would do anything that you don’t actually have to get in there and measure with a ruler. When you lay out clouds, it’s best to simplify and only have a few values. You can add subtleties later, but stress the perspective and the big forms.

Does it rank with my best work? No, but yesterday morning I pulled some of my portraits from 2021 and the articulation of form in this piece is way better. When I have painted badly, especially if it’s gone on for more than a single piece, I get rattled, and this piece chilled me out a bit. Have I got my mojo back? Not all the way but considering what I’m going through in the world, this piece is doing pretty well.

You who are reading this, who are also going through this horrible era, dealing with the oppressive hatred and rage around us, I wish you strength and resilience.

Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

I’ve been trying to keep this blog strictly about art but what’s going on in the world is messing me up as an artist and I have to talk about it. Because in your life, things from the outside will intrude and it’s a good way to know some of your options, as an artist, for coping with things out of your control.

Last night a young Israeli couple was gunned down outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., so the globalized Intifada has officially landed in the US. Apparently the man was actually Christian but he had Israeli cooties so being Christian did not save him. But that’s just this morning, and by now it’s nothing unusual. Every day I wake to learn about a new blood libel, new lies gone viral, something new every day that falls in line with the pattern recognition of Jewish history, of how we get to pogroms, how we get to being murdered by our neighbors, it’s happened so many times. I can’t look away, I have to know how close is the threat.

Do I have PTSD? My entire people have PTSD. Usually it’s under control. Now it isn’t.

It really gets in the way of my painting.

Four years ago, when an old dear now ex-friend told me that the Mossad had killed the Kennedys — and he should know better because he spent 30 years researching the CIA coverup of JFK’s assassination — that sent me spinning. It led to my reading Jewish history and going through extensive work to make peace with my dead ancestors. That led to my best paintings, the Beyond series. It led to good work because I could say oh that guy is just one guy, one guy I trusted and should not have, but he’s just a lone nut, and I could channel my feelings into work that just isn’t that emotional because I didn’t think I was dealing with a problem that was systemic to society.

Within the year, my model for the Beyond series, who had been my best model ever, told me to my face, without blinking, that all the evil on earth comes from the Jews. I had thought we were friends. Silly me.

I had to find new models and never really got my groove back but I was doing OK. Then 10/7/23 happened, 1200 Jews and foreign workers in Israel were massacred, babies raped and burned in ovens, women raped until their hips break, the perpetrators calling home to brag to their parents how many Jews they just killed, and the Internet erupted with condemnations of the victims. Not their gleeful slaughterers. My Threads feed was so clogged with posts calling for “Death to Israel!” and “Death to the Jews!” that at first I spent all day blocking them and finally after two days gave up and closed my Threads account. My Instagram account was likewise clogged but IG is how artists network so I had to hold onto that so I just went through blocking everyone who cheered for Jewish or Israeli death. And I lost hundreds of followers, presumably for my (((name))).

The fact that “Death to the Jews!” was shouted all over the Internet in the same breath as “Death to Israel!” told me that all those people who said, “I’m not antisemitic, I just hate Israel” were craven hypocrites.

So I did what artists did. I didn’t know what the real story was. I had months of research ahead of me to suss it all out. In the interim, I did pieces about my grief and confusion. People don’t like those paintings, although they’re good paintings. They don’t like how it makes them feel, I get it. They don’t like feeling the way we feel every day.

Hunted for something we didn’t do. Surrounded. Paranoid. Because what’s going on is not one lone nut. It’s foundational in our society, and the polite veneer has just worn off.

I read everything. Israeli history, Islamic history, Palestinian history, Persian history, the history of antisemitism, psychological theories of gaslighting, I read everything remotely related to what I was going through. It took several months before I felt I could make a judgment about the issue in good faith. I started out not knowing what to believe, I started out neutral. It was not guaranteed that I was going to come down on the side of my people. The facts put me there. Hardcore. I did not start out a Zionist. I became one because of long, deep and broad research that continues to this day and probably will last the rest of my life.

So every day I wake up, and I check the news to find out how close we are to the historical patterns of massacres pretty much every 50 years for the past 2500 years. I check to find out how close is the beast running behind me, whose hot breath I feel on the back of my neck. How many beasts are there, are they just from behind or is there one to the left and one to the right and one waiting on the trail just ahead of me.

And in the midst of this, I’m trying to make paintings that people who aren’t living through this might enjoy.

On IG, I see paintings of pretty women in pretty dresses, and I think, yeah I can’t do that anymore. I wish I could. I wish I could paint something light and escapist but I can’t. Because there is no escape.

I really envy people who can paint light things.

Every day in the news, the noose tightens. I try not to think about it. I did a couple of pieces of David, running for his life in the wilderness. They were too emotional. I was trying too hard to be upbeat in the midst of a sense of impending doom. I realize that despite my best efforts, I can’t pull it off.

The beast is too close. I can smell its breath. I can’t make paintings that are calm.

It’s time to stop painting through what I’m experiencing.

I had a conversation last week with a Jew who said, “It’s not depression if you have a genuine reason to be in mourning.”

Right, but the painting isn’t helping. Now what. I’m a painter. What do I paint?

When I bottom out, when I’m out of ideas, when what I have to convey is too heavy for people to want to see, the thing to paint is master copies.

At the very worst, it improves your technical skills.

My husband Olav just asked me, “Are there any master paintings of pogroms?” I answered him, “Well you’d have to be looking at Jewish artists, and not that many Jewish artists got that good, and the ones who did, and who painted pogroms, you just can’t look at the paintings. You can’t stand to look at the paintings.”

So let’s talk about doing master copies that might actually be beneficial.

When I talk to artists about master copies, they might ask, “Oh, who do you like best to copy?” I think that’s missing the whole point of a master copy.

To do a master copy, you get all analytical. You give your work a serious critique and decide where you’re weak and what qualities you want to bolster. Then you find an artist who doesn’t have that weakness and you copy them.

When you’re going through a really emotional time, this can be a good thing to do. You eliminate the whole issue of content. You don’t have to think about your life problems. You only have to think about technical problems.

There are different ways to do a master copy. For instance, there’s the little kind with very little detail that teaches you composition. I rarely do those and right now, that’s what’s calling my name. I’ve been thinking about the Russian Itinerants like Repin and his way with multifigure compositions. Those little compositional master copies, you don’t have to do a lot of research. I tend to do them on gesso’d paper so I can get the exact proportions; master works are rarely the proportions of standard panel sizes. Because you’re working small, what kind of brush you’re using doesn’t matter much. Even the palette doesn’t matter much; a grisaille master copy is perfectly valid if it teaches you some composition.

When doing a master copy where you actually want to understand the artist’s full approach, though, it’s a good idea to emulate the original as closely as possible. Paint it full size. Do some research and try to find out the original surface, the brushes, the palette, the medium. Try to emulate the order of execution. Use the same brush, mix the same colors, in the same layers. It can be useful if you can find out whether your artist premixed or worked from puddles, because so much of a painting happens on the palette. Sometimes you can find out this information if you can see an artist’s palette.

Do not paint it in your own style; you’ll learn nothing. The whole point of the exercise is to try to get into the other artist’s head. You want to learn how they think. You want to be right there, experiencing their string of decisions.

Is this escapist? Yes. It’s like escaping into math; you’re escaping into a technical problem that does not engage your emotions.

Sometimes you have to let your emotions rest.

We are here to spread beauty and truth and light. Take care of yourself.

A few years ago when Colleen Barry was still painting naturalistically, I was enchanted with how she would flatten out some shapes in the middle of a volumetric rendered passage, e.g., a light area, and that flat shape would act as an island of clarity surrounded by gradations of modelling. It would be an emphasis, a sforzando. I asked her, “Do you make these flat shapes first and then render around them or do you render the form and then decide to make an area flat?” She answered that she rendered the form and then chose the area to flatten.

I thought this thinking was fascinating because it told me that she got to know the form by rendering it, and then once she understood the form, she knew what shapes would be stronger if they were simplified.

In my last couple of pieces, I had a figure against a glowering overcast sky. Both figure and sky were fully rendered. I compressed my values to make the shapes bigger but the images were still too complicated. I had not compressed enough.

Well those pieces were heavy on concept so by the time I finished the second one, I was exhausted and discouraged and out of ideas. I started thinking about my friend Larisa Brechun’s painting I had seen at the New Salem Museum of Art because she was onto something I needed. Larisa doesn’t have a good photo of the painting so we’ll have to make do with the iPhone photo I took while I was there, glare and all:

Now what I love about Larisa’s piece is that there’s fricking nothing there. It’s mostly one shape of light against the dark, with a moon and a ton of sophisticated edge transitions.

Elegantly simple.

So while I was burned out I started a master copy of Larisa’s piece. I didn’t ask her what colors she used or what brushes because I wanted to reverse engineer it. I figured she used hog bristle brushes or something similarly stiff but not extremely pointed. She may have used filberts but I figured rounds. I think it’s safe to guess she used transparent red oxide, either veridian or phthalo green, probably raw umber, maybe ivory black, and either a yellow ochre or a Naples yellow. So I got cracking on my master copy and as usual within a couple of hours I was nowhere near done with her master copy but I had an idea for a new piece of my own. Which is why doing master copies is a great thing to do when you’re burned out.

I guessed that she had started with a brunaille of raw umber so I started my master copy and my new piece the same way: I mixed Old Holland’s Raw Umber, which has a deep golden undertone, with mineral spirits, painted it all over the panel and then wiped it off with paper towel so I had a nice even velatura of pretty much a #7 value (on a scale of 1-10, 1 being black and 10 being white). Then while the velatura was still wet, I drew the image onto the master copy with raw umber and a hog’s hair round. I usually find brunailles quite tricky because I can’t get the paint to move on a dry panel so it’s really difficult to control values. I don’t think I had ever tried doing a brunaille on a moist velatura before, and to my delight I found that was the trick. If you don’t mix the paint with anything and you just lay it down straight, the residue of mineral spirits on the panel gives you all the tonal control you need.

So when I started my own piece, I started with a brunaille, which I almost never do, and worked out the composition.

The top of this is working well; I had really simplified the sky and the figure. But I started painting in full color, and when I got to the legs, I saw there was still the problem of little shapes. So I slept on it. And then I had the idea to consolidate the darks at the bottom. So I tried it out in The Gimp, crudely but it gave me enough information to proceed:

It’s still not as simple as Larisa’s. Would be nice if I had a pose that was curled up like that, so the figure makes a nice compact shape, but I don’t. Maybe next piece. But still, that dark area would give me the opportunity for some nice edge work by the legs and a diagonal that lends some energy to the overly rectilinear and static pose. So I started painting.

*Should* I make my edges as soft as Larisa’s? The question is why would you? I don’t normally do very soft edges and things can get woolly in a hurry. So I defaulted to my usual decision to lose edges only when the positive and negative spaces share values.

Here is what I came up with. Large parts of the background have flat values, but we still have enough clues to go into recession.

Is it done? I think it’s done enough. There’s blessed little paint on it and huge parts of the background have only the velatura but because the brunaille did the heavy lifting, most of the values were there from the get-go and it didn’t require a bunch of layers. I did this with a basic red-orange/blue palette and I want to try a more compressed pose with the classic red/green. And softer edges. This is a piece that is almost content-less, which is so much easier to do. But Larisa put a bug in my ear and I want to finish her master copy, learn how she thinks.

While I was painting this, I was thinking about Ivan Kramskoy and Repin, because they are my poster boys for how to do value compression and how to refine an idea. Let’s look at Kramskoy’s “Christ in the Wilderness”.

Look at its three-value notan study, which I got by throwing it into the Gimp, Image > Mode > Grayscale, and then Color > Posterize > Posterize levels = 3.

Before I had ever heard of the term “compression of values,” this is the piece that showed me intuitively how it’s done. There are basically three big shapes: the sky, the figure, and the earth. Kramskoi brought us into recession by stepping us backwards through ruts in the earth and using various tools like overlapping the rocks and atmospheric perspective, but he did this in a very narrow value space that maintained the big shape. The figure is dark with the values likewise compressed, and that dark shape is extended to the left, into deep space, and into the rock shadows, in both cases to balance the composition and keep the eye moving. The mid tone of the rocks is extended into the lights of the figure to serve as a transition to the sky and again to unify the composition. But frankly, the power of this piece comes from the fact that basically you have only three big shapes.

How do you do compression of values? Essentially for a given large shape, you decide what your average value should be, then (on a value scale of 1 to 10) you mix up a value lighter and a value darker and when you’re painting that shape, you exercise the discipline to stay within that narrow range. This description assumes that you’re adding white to a given pigment to raise its value.

It’s a lot harder to do with transparent pigments but the principle remains: you stick to the value range.

“Christ in the Wilderness” is one of the best paintings Kramskoi ever did. Did he roll out of bed one day and dash it off? No, he worked for it. Here’s a study he did along the way, when he was feeling out his treatment.

This rough early study is interesting because it shows his decisions. Look how he’s lightened the foreground in order to have enough detail to bring you into recession. Look how he’s almost eliminated the gradient at the top of the sky. He brought a fair bit of detail into the figure too, while keeping the idea of the silhouette. And he turned the figure to face the viewer, presumably so they can see the facial expression, although you can get a lot of emotion out of a spine. Also, you can see that in the early study, he kind of bleeped over what the landscape is doing. In the final piece, he forced himself to get really decided about what each rut and rock was doing, and to get in there and explicitly nail its geometry with hard edges. The value compression prevents the hard edges from grabbing the eye.

Now let’s look at Repin. Here’s his “Barge-Haulers on the Volga”. Another masterpiece of value compression, where landscape elements take you into deep space.

Here’s this piece posterized to four values so we can see the notan. You see he’s massed the figures (and the ship) into pretty much one big shape which he breaks up a little but not much, and already with some very sparse cues he’s sent us from foreground to deep space. The small light shapes within the dark mass give it “air” — it’s a technique you use when painting trees, for example — but there is always a connecting dark shape to keep the eye traveling across the expanse of the big mass.

Now, lest you think Repin just bleeped over detail in the figures, let me dispel all illusions, but note that he restricted himself within a three- or four-value range, and broke up his lighter areas with dark connectors to keep the mass unified:

I haven’t seen this piece in real life but I’ve seen photos of it in a gallery and it’s a lot smaller than you’d think. I’d estimate that these heads are only about two inches high. Again, this is one of the best paintings Repin ever made, but it did not come overnight. Here’s an early version, which is even rougher than my own painting:

A weird thing about this early study is that head popping up on the right as if it’s emerging from the back of the rightmost guy’s head; it looks like Repin added it as a transition to the mass of dark greenery and it didn’t really work. But the greenery is there because the mass of figures was a big dark spot in the middle of the canvas — compositional suicide. So he started with the mass in the middle, and then he added the trees to move the eye, but they competed with the central mass and led your eye off the edge of the canvas on the right. So he added the ship to drag the eye to the left. He hasn’t come up with elegant solutions yet, but Repin’s experiments show why you might do a study, or even a whole painting, to let you know where be dragons. If you have completed a painting but you know you can figure out a better strategy, it’s worth doing the painting over. Between this piece and the final piece, you can see Repin changed his mind about just about everything. The biggest change was that in the final piece, he eliminated any foreground landscape elements dark enough to compete with the figures, so he didn’t have to have stupid disembodied heads failing to solve a transition problem. He came up with an arrangement of figures to produce a more elegant mass, and added more light shapes — “air” — to lighten up the mass and stop your eye from landing there and getting stuck.

This early study of Repin’s is not in the same league as his final painting. I find that really encouraging.

Onward.

If you feel I have benefited you in any way, please consider a paid subscription.