Slapping Slip
Monday, December 28th, 2009
Welcome to the first installment of my new occasional segment, Reflections of a Painter Attempting to Paint the Unpaintable. Do you have something unpaintable in mind? Without making any promises, I issue the home team challenge: try me. Then I go ahead and make promises, such as: (1) I can attempt to paint that, and (2) I didn’t say you would like it.
Challenge #1: Slapping Slip. The feel of the kick-wheel, the latent motion in wet clay, the moment when you want to eat it because it looks like custard or mousse or chocolate sauce even though you know it’s not custard or mousse or chocolate sauce. How do you find a brush soft enough for that silky liquidity, but rough enough for the bulk of clay? Do you need to prep the canvas with anything special, like dirt? How do you resist the urge to eat while painting, because oils are technically toxic but this whole idea makes you really, really hungry?
The dirt question is easy enough: as all starving artists know, paint covers up dirty canvasses just as well as clean ones. Actual dirt is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for an illustration of slapping slip.
The brush issue requires more trial and error, because it begins with a faulty assumption that brushes are appropriate to this project. As it turns out, it takes ditching tools small and large, bristles of delicate camel hair and harshest hog, arranged in formations pointy and fanned, in favor of straight-tubing it. You know what I’m talkin’ about: throw fine points to the wind and let the paint blurt out without thought like that thing you really shouldn’t have said at the super-fancy dinner party that time when the husband of the gallery owner was all, “I’m very wary of drinking bronze things,” and you were all, “Why, are you afraid of being polished?”
Embarrassment only hurts for a minute, and then you have the hilarity of inverted Schadenfreude forever. That’s what slapping slip is all about, and it’s delicious. Don’t eat the paint.
(Artwork is oils on 16″ x 20″ stretched canvas.)
