Table of Contents

Lake painting

Name: M. Whitman

Date and Time: 

2021.06.03, 9:00am

Location: Apartment, Manhattan

Subject: Lake painting

The morning was humid and wet, I got caught in the rain right before class began. My cochineal lake didn’t seem to have dried out much since its final rinse. I left it on the kitchen counter but its texture was pretty malleable and it even looked a bit damp.

When we started prepping materials, I tried to measure out the gum with a scale but I think because my scale doesn’t do tenths, I used less gum than I should have and wound up with a watery mixture. I later dissolved more into the water but I think this probably affected my initial attempts at painting. For the egg yolk and white, I separated the yolk using shells but as with the ‘ice’ earlier, I believe I didn’t cleanly separate the two. My attempts at whisking and stiffening the white just made it frothy with no real additional volume. This is clearly a skill I need to develop further.

When combining the cochineal with the two types of egg binders, I was surprised at how quickly and smoothly the paint came together. It resembled the consistency of acrylic paint, did not seem gritty at all, and I thought I combined it well initially even without use of the muller. However, when I moved to paint it out, I was a bit taken aback to find that it spread with the consistency of watercolor paints. It was transparent and went on in a sort of wash (with both white and yolk binders). I am not sure why this was: the egg binders? The damp lake? Not enough combining? I used the muller to try to get something thicker but had no luck. Even when I washed the brush, the paint came off in clumps instead of dissolving. To me it seemed a little bit like past experiences painting when I’ve mixed the perfect shade but have not made nearly enough of it, and so I would stretch the use of the paint by adding water, which was not ideal because it would spread with little opacity. Anyway it’s hard to guess what the intervention would be to make it more opaque. When I tried with the gum later, it still spread rather thinly.

The ochre, on the other hand, was a pleasure to work with, and most reminiscent of acrylics, I think because of its consistency. I mentioned on the zoom that it felt like painting with slip, which makes sense because of its clay-like structure. I experimented more with the muller for this one, though I’m not sure I needed to because of how well it combined from the start.

The azurite was much grittier and I don’t think I used enough of it to be able to mull it well. This was another where I would reach a consistency that seemed like I could spread it with the brush, only to have it stick to the brush and only spread in solids. I used the muller most for this pigment in order to better integrate the particles, but it was rather difficult. Naomi mentioned making the azurite ‘sing,’ which I found intriguing. I wonder how much the author practitioner and others would have relied on their hearing when the eye could perhaps not detect the appropriate level of combination.

The azurite is the pigment where I most noticed the color effects of the egg yolk.

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