These fantastic books wandered into Russia at some point and have taken off with a vengeance. I can’t read Russian but I can see the quality of the work that goes into their “little sketches”. Frankly, I feel lazy and wasteful in comparison. I barely rough out the most minimal of line drawings in my book. In contrast, they offer things like this:

Or this:

And these aren’t even the best of what’s been on display recently in the Russian Moleskine group you can find here.

Well worth a glance, or two, or five.

Update:

I’ve been asked how I came across the group. I found it through the LJ script. The LJ script is a tiny bit of web script that brings up a list of the 30 pictures most recently posted to Live Journal. One can be found here. Just make sure there are no children around before you click that link. You never know what could come up and you never forget your first goatse.

I’ve made about 11 of these so far and they are destined to be worked into 4 pieces. I’ve not added colors yet but they will be muted when I do add them. I’ve trying to come up with  something which looks impartial but not emotionless. I think of them as “The Mediators”.

Made from encaustic medium & handmade paper.

Update:
Each face measures approximately 7 inches in height.

Socrates said that the fewer our wants, the nearer we resemble the gods. St. Thomas Aquinas said the God was infinitely simple. St. Francis could imagine no better or greater life than a simple one. Lao Tzu said that simplicity was the greatest treaure of the Tao and Tolstoy said there is no greatness without simplicity.

Euegene Delacroix said that a taste for simplicity cannot last for long.

I’m willing to risk it.

I’m tired of objects owning me. I want to own fewer than 100 objects by the end of the year.

Of course, I’ll have to cheat a bit to get that. For example, I won’t be counting individual forks in my drawer but I will count the entire set as an item. (One set of flatware.) Food shall also be excluded. (I refuse to keep a running tally of apples and eggs.)  Since I share my studio space (and I don’t want to be an unholy terror to other people) I will also restrict this project to home and not work.

Hmmm. My plans for simplicity are starting to not be simple. Oh well. I think it was Einstein that said that things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

(clicky to embiggen)

The above picture is not a bad example of a piece I’ve started and will likely not touch again for 1-3 months at the soonest. It’s an underpainting constructed of hand made paper, encaustic medium, and oil stick (burnt sienna and burnt umber).

Having constructed the underpainting very quickly I will now stare at it for a long time before I do anything. I’ve added it to a Flickr stream that serves as the screensaver on my computer and the AppleTV so it will be paraded in front of me a lot and considered carefully. I’ll pull out and finish some other pieces that have been on the back burner for a few months and just let this one hang in limbo for a while. Once I’m convinced that the underpainting is solid and that my final idea is sound I’ll probably finish the rest of the work in 3-6 hours.

It’s that long wait that had me worried though. I worried that people would see dozens of half finished works laying about and conclude that I have the attention span of a stunned salmon with ADHD.

In the end, I decided I would rather have feedback.

Here goes!

Update:
The piece measures approximately 20″x17″

I can’t be positive but I believe he was talking about wax emulsion. It’s not exactly encaustic but it does look a lot like it.

Beeswax Emulsion

1. Melt one ounce filtered beeswax with five ounces of distilled water.
2. Mix 1/2 ounce ammonium carbonate with just enough distilled water to make a thin paste.
3. Add this mixture to the melted wax and stir until it emulsifies like a mayonnaise and the ammonia fumes are gone.

That’s all. Ammonia carbonate can usually be found in stores as smelling salts or sal volatile. If you have no luck finding those you can substitute a teaspoon of half-strength ammonia water.

How does it work? You mix the paste into acrylic paints (about 30-40% wax by volume) and paint with it just as you would with any other acrylic paint and a palette knife. It dries overnight and has an interesting surface when compared to other encaustic paintings. Your colors will be matte rather than glossy.

I don’t use it a lot myself  but it’s great to work with when you are on the road since no melting or fusing is required.

I’m shooting for two days of renovation work, two days of creative labors, and three days of rest to pace myself as I get started again. Pictures of both will be going up here regularly although blogging will be light until renovations are complete in the studio space.

Cheers!