I’m still riffing on the ideas that opened up when creating the SFMOMA Window Gallery installation. How to synthesize painting with silkscreen printing? What about a rock image makes a great painting? How can the processes of silkscreen printing, especially the layering effects, be brought off as a painting?

I brought some elements of the Window installation painting, “Saint Everyone,” to my new painting, “Heathen Child.” I’m working from a rock poster palette and from rock poster imagery. The Ginderman poster was the basis for the imagery of “Heathen Child,” but I wanted to take this in a new direction with materials and technique.

I used my circle patterns and carefully silkscreened a wide selection of patterns in different sizes in heavy metallic blue silver with green tinting on very delicate japanese printing paper. I was sure this would make a wonderful color for the background of the painting, layer nicely and become embedded in the surface of the canvas.

I laid a thick layer of cadmium red for the figure and flowers. This was modeled – shaded and highlighted – with many glazes of fluorescent red and orange to build up the surface and form. I brushed in shadows of cadmium and knocked those back with subsequent glaze layers of fluorescent. I needed the final edge color to be intense enough to eye-fry when the blue line was brushed on at the end. But wanted the shadow effects to translate in the finished art.

The lava forms were built up with fluorescent push-pull with cadmium, but the difference there was to build up a highlighted finish with pearl lustre. There is an pearlescent finish on the lava forms.

After the red areas were treated I put the background. Each circle was carefully cut out and then puzzled right to the edge of the red figure. I used gloss gel medium for under the paper surface and liquid gloss medium brushed over the paper surface.

Cobalt and permanent green for the foliage over the layered paper at the foreground.

Then when the brush and stars aligned – I finished the figure with blue eye-fry paint – first-stroke best stroke style – breathing deeply and making gestural strokes until it was finished with a very nice worked-in brush.

Like “Saint Everyone” – “Heathen Child” is a painting exploring direct religious experience in a psychedelic key of fluorescent, and perhaps a little more pagan or pantheistic in scope. Here’s some details (click to see larger):

Heathen Child, 2011

Acrylic and applique on canvas

24 x 26

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Heathen Child is available through Varnish Fine Art Gallery, 16 Jesse Street, San Francisco.

I’m really happy to see Jen Rogers and Kerri Stephens have brought Varnish Fine Art back to life and have such cool new digs for shows!

Varnish Fine Art Relaunch Part I

September 24 – through – November 5, 2011

group show with: Chris Mars, Robert Williams, Jennybird Alcantara, Laurie Lipton, Isabel Samaris, Scott Musgrove, Annie Owens, Craig LaRotonda, Nathan Spoor, Chuck Sperry, Kevin Peterson, Beth Bojarski, Edith Lebeau, Aunia Kahn, Ciou, Robert Bowen, Sri Zeno Whipple, Winston Smith, Kevin Evans, Dylan Sisson, Skot Olsen