During grad school, I’ve found my ideal surface. In the 808 Wood Shop, I’ve gained the skills to construct my own panels of any size or depth, sometimes creating the cradle using found hardwood with appealing grains and colors, such as poplar, cherry, and oak. In the future I hope to afford such wood for larger panels, because when I’m holding a cradled panel made from beautiful pieces of wood, I feel even more excited to work on it, and using special materials almost seems like casting a spell to help the painting succeed. I also become more invested in salvaging difficult paintings when the stage of their creation is an especially nice panel that I’ve made with my own hands.

I’ve come to rely on the panel’s stability. By working on panel, rather than flexible canvas, I can use sharp objects to incise the surface, I can rest the weight of my body on the panel when I need to work on it horizontally, and it remains sturdy, steadfast, as I work – unlike canvas, which warps and distorts wherever one is actively working.

When it comes to preparing my substrate for painting, the particularities of the gesso I use are just as important as the nature of the panel. Thanks to Dani Levine’s Fall 2022 workshop, where she shared her knowledge and ‘trade secrets’ with us, I started using an increasingly textured gesso enriched with cellulose fiber (Arbocel) which adds a soft sandy texture to the surface. I initially made gesso with powdered pigments, which was a bit messy, and recently I’ve been mixing the Arbocel with Regal Select 100% acrylic paint from Benjamin Moore (colors like Smoke Embers and Deep Ochre) with excellent results. I’d like to befriend a conservator and ask them if there are any properties of this paint that would interfere with it being archival – although I’m always eager to know the rules about what’s archival and what’s not, I believe people are too quick to assume that non-archival materials are going to spontaneously crumble to dust in a few years. It’s not just ‘house paint,’ it’s ‘Benjamin Moore Regal Select Flat’! I definitely feel a sense of tension between wanting to follow ‘rules of best practice’ and an (often stronger) impulse to ‘see what I can get away with.’ I really like this gesso for now, because the matte finish is better than regular gesso, and I need a large quantity of gesso material, given that I apply a good half-gallon of the mixture to a medium-large panel.

I embrace the chance variations in texture that occur in the gesso based on how much material is on my brush and the relative humidity of the day. Later, when I’m working on a painting and use sandpaper or a dry-brushing technique, the gesso’s texture can produce surprising and pleasing effects. This sandy-textured gesso has the added benefit of enabling me to work larger and faster – whereas ultra-smooth gesso, which I used in the past, made me more slow and obsessive about picking out every speck of dust and hair. Finally, the rough texture lets me layer paint and ink in unusual ways that wouldn’t be possible on a smoother substrate. Once I’ve applied and lightly sanded five or so layers of this gesso, the panel is ready for painting.

In my BU studio I have been refining my technique of using my ‘trifecta’ of favorite materials: egg tempera, India ink, and acrylic gouache. I used to paint exclusively with egg tempera, then started adding an underpainting of India ink, and most recently added an ‘under-underpainting’ layer of acrylic gouache. All this layering is crucial to achieving certain color effects and surface textures, and it’s worth the extra effort in order to see certain colors created by optically mixing the transparent India ink and opalescent egg tempera over certain opaque base colors of acrylic gouache.

Starting from the bottom-most layer: the acrylic gouache (a term I use to encompass all the brands of matte acrylic paint) often has a chalky cast to the color, though Golden’s SoFlat line has perhaps as much saturation as can be coaxed from matte acrylics. I generally thin the paint to the consistency of heavy cream and enjoy how fast it dries – so I can keep working on refining a composition as long as I like, without the tedium of waiting for oil colors to dry. I never felt happy using those plasticky, shiny ‘Heavy Body’ type acrylics, but with SoFlat, it’s a whole new world.

Once this matte acrylic ‘under-underpainting’ is established, I’ll use the second member of the ‘trifecta,’ India ink from Ph. Martin’s Bombay line, which can be thinned with water yet dries with a completely waterproof surface, thanks to its shellac content. I also love Faber-Castell India ink brush pens for these same qualities, and although their small size makes them more suited for detail work, I am grateful to them for being the ‘gateway drug’ that first led me into the realm of India ink. Often the ink mark is slightly ‘harsh’ and I often make a mark, then smudge and soften it with my hand in the momentary window before it dries. When I’m glazing with the ink, it’s easy for a whole painting to become too dark, too fast – and often I’ll push the painting ‘too dark’ then scumble over areas with a lighter color of the acrylic gouache.

The topmost layer consists of egg tempera, the medium favored by artists before the advent of oil paint. I am forever grateful to an artist named Gian Berto Vanni (b. 1927, Rome) who, during my second year of undergraduate studies, introduced our class to this technique of painting with pigments in a binder of egg yolk. In his tempera demonstration, Vanni delicately cracked an egg, rinsed it under the sink and discarded everything but the yolk. He used a paper towel to dry his fingers while passing the yolk from hand to hand, and then showed us how to (in his words) “hold the yolk by the neck, like a kitten” to release the inner contents and discard the membrane. A splash of water and a drop of vinegar to ward off microbes, and the medium was ready to mix with an equal volume of pigment to create the freshly-mixed egg tempera paint.

These days, I mix the egg medium with tubes of watercolor or gouache, adding more or less water depending on the transparency needed in a given area. Egg tempera dries to the touch within minutes, and at this initial stage, it can still be wiped away with water – then, over the course of a few weeks, it becomes waterproof and polymerized from the oil/fat in the egg yolk. The egg tempera has all the luminosity of the ink, yet makes a more gentle, delicate mark (in contrast to what I called the ‘harshness’ of the ink). The egg tempera also has an index of refraction that is similar to that of oil paint – and the luminescent color, satin finish, and pearlescent effects are the perfect ‘icing’ on top of the other layers.

The material description above represents a working method that feels very ‘right’ to me, and I could imagine developing this ‘trifecta’ strategy for the rest of my life, though I’m open-minded about adopting other material approaches. In recent years I have experimented with laminating fabric onto panels (nice texture, not really worth the trouble) and mixed copious amounts of powdered graphite and mica into my homemade gesso. I’ve created matte fields of oil paint mixed with cold wax for the backgrounds of paintings, employed sign-painting enamel for marbleized effects, and explored many ways of working with paper for my books related to Richard Ryan’s Poetry Project. Playing with new materials can be invigorating though I have to be careful not to become too swept away by material experiments – I could see myself falling down a rabbit-hole of quilting or wood joinery with dowels, and it’s unclear whether such ‘side quests’ might benefit my painting practice in some oblique way, or just be a way of frittering away energy and time. Overall, I’m grateful for the constraints of using ‘paint-like substances on panel’ and feel like I have much to explore and discover within the limits of this terrain.