Mount Rainier, from the East (Gather)

Another of the classes I am taking this semester is a graduate course on technical art history. Put plainly, the idea of the course is to see what can be learned about an art object by closely examining it for signs of how it was made. (This differs the other main leg of curation, connoisseurship, which could be restated as taste.)

As a result, each week my small cohort travels to either a conservation lab at a museum, or an artist's studio, and see firsthand how art is made, or how it is investigated to learn how it was made. Last week, we went to the Crucible, a large industrial arts studio in West Oakland, where we got to visit the forge, the smith, an enamel studio, and a jewelry studio. 

Yes, that's a Hello Kitty forge. No, I don't think they paid the licensing fees. Shhhhhhhhh!

The forge was particularly impressive. While not large in scale, here artisans were making sculptures, vessels, and other three-dimension work in bronze, iron, aluminum, and several other metals. The process of making a bronze, however, was the most eye-opening. These are the steps, from my notebook:

1. Make an original sculpture from some dense material, such as hardwood, clay, stone, etcetera.

2. Make a mold of this sculpture using plaster.

3. Pour hot wax into the plaster mold and let cool. 

4. Break the mold and retrieve the wax sculpture. 

5. Repeat above steps to make as many wax sculptures as the number of finished bronzes.

6. Encase each wax sculpture in a special ceramic.

7. Using a special oven, melt the wax sculpture, leaving only the ceramic negative.

8. Pour molten bronze into the ceramic negative.

9. Once cooled, destroy the ceramic negative to free the finished bronze. 

So many steps, but what struck me at the time was one key word: the negative. Here, in a process literally older than recorded history, was this concept of the "negative" as a precursor to a finished "positive." A finished bronze seems so unitary, so complete and whole, but in fact it is the end product of a process of positives and negatives, most of which are lost in the making of the thing. Nobody just cracks out the metal, says et voila!, pours, and has a masterpiece. Every bronze, to my eyes, now exists alongside a ghostly presence of every positive and negative that lead to it, works that were no less the result of fine craftsmanship and sensitive artistry—lost masterpieces of wax and of mud. 

When we moved on to the smith, there was a similar lesson. They were working on a large iron sculpture, a figure with elongated proportions. The work so far was handsome, but what struck me was that the final project was dependent on a series of graphite sketches made on a 12" x 48" piece of wood. Here was a work of art that needed a human capable of wielding large hammers, jostling around awkward and heavy pieces of metal, capable of rough work in a loud and rough environment. Those hammers, however, had to be wielded with sensitivity. And before the work could be done, that same artisan needed to be able to draw complex shapes with enough finesse to represent three dimensions on two. Who would ever see that board, with its pencil sketches, but us who got to visit during the making process? Yet that work was as beautiful as anything that was placed on final display somewhere. 

As I considered my work for this week, it was these thoughts, gathered from my visit to the crucible, that swam about in my brain. What would it be like if I slowed down the iterative process that proceeds a painting? In the past, I have treated any work that precedes a painting—field photographs, sketches, diagrams, paint tests—as valueless in themselves. They were merely a means to an end, best done with speed and efficiency in mind. Get on with the main event! Et voila! The cloth is removed from the great work.

So this week, I tried to linger through the process. It was not that I spent any more time on it, but rather that I tried to go through each step with full attention and care.

First, I decided to paint an image so strong that it stuck with me in my memory: a view of the east face of Mount Rainier from eastern Washington State, on a visit more than ten years ago. As a westsider, I was used to seeing the Cascades volcanos rising in the east from great forested mountains, but in the high coulee country of eastern Washington, there sometimes appear to be no foothills. There is the wheat, rolling on the landscape ever westward, and at the horizon, Rainier simply pushes up without preamble. I noticed it only toward the end of the day, the sky glowing an odd orange, the land fallen to darkness. 

Bringing out a few gray markers and a small newsprint pad, I sketched out the idea, paying attention especially to the horizon line that would make or break the work. 

Next, using some ink pens, I redid the scene, paying more attention to detail. 

At this point I realized that I didn't have a handle for the exact outline of Rainier from memory. While the idea overall was to paint a landscape remembered, I wanted the mountain to feel right, so I double-checked my memory by doing a google image search for "Mount Rainier" and "Ritzville," a town near where I first saw the scene. Using these, I made some reference sketches in ink to get the outline into my head. 

Next, I wanted to see what I could do with color to capture that feeling. I wanted to capture the sense of starkness, yet not flatten the image into a purely graphic form. Using a smaller piece of watercolor paper, I painted in two different versions of the sky, and then laid out two different treatments for the foreground land atop these skies, giving me four alternatives. Once dry, I compared these until I decided which approach I liked best. 

It was only after these stages that I finally began the painting. I found my approach included more trepidation. The painting did not always go as planned, but when it didn't, I found myself more open to working with the peculiarities of the paint and water, letting it add its own layer to the prior work. 

I'm still processing this process, pun intended. I'm not yet sure what I make of it. The pre-work still feels like "pre-work" to me—could it be more than that? The originals and waxes that preceded the final bronzes had character in their own right—could the pre-work for my paintings be equally elevated? Could they, or should they, be part of a final work? Or should they, like the waxes and the negatives, be hidden or even semi-ritually destroyed? I'm still working through the answers.

Mount Rainier, from the East. Watercolor on paper, 12 x 16 inches, 2016.